Integrate healthy and sustainable diets in public procurement

As major purchasers of food and catering services, public authorities can play an important role in supporting sustainable food production, distribution, and consumption. Public procurement can drive healthy and sustainable diets through the following measures:

• Develop a public regulatory framework and policies for PFP schemes. This will help to:
  • Enable the implementation of PFP schemes that favour or prioritize certain suppliers (e.g. local, smallholder farms that use sustainable practices like agroecology or climate-smart agriculture).
  • Establish simplified rules and procedures to facilitate contract “lotting” (i.e. where large contracts are divided into smaller, more manageable lots), making it easier for SMEs to win tenders and addressing power imbalances between large and small food providers.
  • Allow greater consideration of sustainability issues associated with food procurement (e.g. impacts on human health and the environment) rather than awarding contracts based solely on the lowest economic cost. For example, Scotland’s Procurement Reform Act requires that all contracting authorities consider sustainability dimensions when awarding contracts.
  • Strengthen the emphasis on equitable and inclusive sourcing of sustainable, local (especially from SMEs), seasonal and fresh products. Prioritize sourcing food that was produced using climate resilient and agroecological farming practices.
  • Develop and adopt SPP criteria at the national and municipal level and make them mandatory for food procurement. Implement policies to support smallholders, family farmers, Indigenous Peoples, peasants, women, youth, and local communities.
• Ensure that existing public procurement criteria align with ambitious climate, health and animal welfare goals for food systems:
  • Source nutritious plant-based options and make these more commonplace on menus, thereby helping to enable a balanced diet.
  • Increase the procurement of free-range and organic animal products or require contractors to enforce stronger animal protection standards in meat and dairy production.
  • Source food products that are handled with low environmental impact packaging throughout the supply chain.
  • Ensure bulk purchases and that food stocks are carefully managed to avoid waste.
  • Include full life cycle cost when evaluating PFP tender proposals to decrease carbon impact, by considering emissions that arise throughout the entire life cycle, including for example transportation and packaging. For more detailed information on using life cycle impact assessments for agri-food systems, see Assessing agriculture and food system impacts.
  • Ensure that any move to more environmentally sustainable menus is made without compromising on taste or nutritional quality, which could reduce consumers’ acceptance of such a shift.
• Adopt and implement SPP criteria:
  • Provide training to procurement officers and caterers on sustainable sourcing and to chefs and nutritionists on sustainable diets and menu design.
  • Set quantifiable and timebound targets to keep institutions accountable and measure progress.
  • Facilitate performance monitoring and budget tracking, including digitalization of procurement processes.
  • Establish a network of best practices to encourage innovation.
  • Encourage contractors who operate their own kitchens to use or purchase energy- and water-efficient equipment.
  • Make public procurement conditional upon the adoption of food waste prevention targets by catering companies to address food waste. For more information on possible food waste measures, see Reducing food waste in gastronomy sector, retail and at household level.
  • Encourage contractors to deliver environmental education activities to the recipient of catering services (e.g. raising awareness about food waste and lower impact diets among schoolchildren).
• Support knowledge sharing and best practices, peer learning and innovative approaches to shifting diets in public institutions.
• Choose the appropriate type of procurement scheme depending on the specific context, for example:
  • Reservation schemes make certain procurement opportunities available only to suppliers who satisfy certain prescribed criteria. They have the potential to benefit family farmers, family rural entrepreneurs, local producers, vulnerable producers (such as land reform settlers and traditional communities) and organic and agroecological producers.
  • Preferencing schemes use a fully competitive tender process but give preference to suppliers who meet certain criteria (e.g. qualification as local or smallholder farmers, or agroecological production). Preferencing schemes potentially benefit local agricultural production.
  • In indirect schemes the procuring entity requires the immediate contractors (e.g. caterers) to purchase food from targeted beneficiaries (e.g. family farmers).
• Implement Environmental Management Systems (EMSs), either directly by the public authorities who operate PFP programmes or indirectly by requiring suppliers to adopt EMSs as conditions for procurement contracts.
• Explore the potential for school gardens to supplement the availability of healthy, fresh foods, while also providing educational opportunities to learn about health, environment, and sustainability.
• Group ecolabels or sustainability certifications under a recognition scheme or pre-approved list. This practice helps public procurers to identify products and services with credible sustainability performance more easily.
• Implement an e-catalogue of sustainable products and services. By creating a centralized platform for sustainable procurement that only features products and services that have been vetted and approved by a central purchasing body, public procurers can identify products and services with credible sustainability performance more easily and make purchases directly without a tender.
• Educate public procurers about sustainable practices. Educational measures such as workshops, guidance materials, training sessions, and online courses foster a culture of sustainability and responsible procurement practices and equip decisionmakers in public procurement with the necessary knowledge to make environmentally conscious decisions.
• Incorporate biodiversity-focused criteria in public ecolabels and certification schemes to facilitate biodiversity-friendly decisions by public procurers.

Creating an enabling governance environment is essential for effectively implementing measures for sustainable public food procurement. These enabling measures can include:

• Setting commitments at the national level to encourage and facilitate conducive conditions for SPP at the local level (e.g., development of clear definitions, objectives and roles).
• Implementing sustainable PFP coupled with other programmes with similar objectives, such as environmental programmes (e.g. initiatives to reduce biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions) or social programmes (e.g. initiatives to improve food literacy among children).
• Establishing a policy framework that reduces costs and risks for SMEs and smallholder producers of nutritious foods.
• Creating certification programmes to encourage producers/suppliers to specialize in sustainable foods.
• Promoting dialogue to understand what the local market and different market actors (e.g. producers, retailers, and wholesalers) have to offer and adjust tender requirements accordingly.
• Introducing food systems-based dietary guidelines that set standards for public procurement (see Introducing food systems-based dietary guidelines).
• Developing a multi-level governance model that delegates some or all PFP authority to local/municipal authorities. Local governments are playing a growing role in the development of sustainable food systems and can play a key role in making PFP more sustainable.
• Developing social/cultural infrastructure (e.g., education, social environment, regulatory frameworks and public communication) that leads to changes in belief systems, values and social norms and that predispose people to accept sustainable lifestyle changes (e.g., healthier and more sustainable diets offered by SPP).
• Increasing the professionalization of procurement by appointing professionals trained to design and evaluate procurement programmes based on social, environmental and/or nutritional context.
• Promoting supply-chain transparency by requiring or incentivizing producers/suppliers to disclose information about their supply chains (e.g., labour practices, product origins or use of pesticides).

Tools and guidance related to sustainable public procurement are increasingly available. These resources can help inform the design of policy measures and quantify their impact:

Tools

Guides

Integrating healthy and sustainable diets into public procurement can also help advance the targets of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), as well as those of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Climate change mitigation benefits

Sustainable public food procurement can increase demand for sustainable and healthy food products with lower carbon footprints while reducing demand for unsustainable, less healthy products with higher carbon footprints. For example:

• By encouraging more plant-based diets, it can address emissions related to livestock production activities.
• Criteria on sustainable supply chains such as eating organic, seasonal local and less packaged foods can address a variety of emissions related to food production, transport and other pre- and post-production processes. This can include emissions from:
  • Production and application of fertilizers, including through freshwater eutrophication and soil acidification.
  • Land-use change and degradation of carbon sinks due to agricultural production, through deforestation, biomass fires and the like.

Climate change adaptation benefits

Among the seven key areas of adaptation put forward in the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, integrating healthy and sustainable diets in public procurement can directly contribute to:

• Target 9a and 9d (Water & Sanitation and Ecosystems): It can help reduce climate-induced water scarcity, promote access to potable water, and contribute to more resilient water supplies and sanitation systems by promoting sustainable diets based on agricultural practices that:
  • Protect biodiversity, ecosystem services, conservation, and restoration efforts
  • Reduce water pollution, groundwater protection and other forms of pollution, including GHG emissions
  • Reduce pressure on water and land resources, including by reducing land-use change and land degradation.
• Target 9b (Food & Agriculture): Public procurement for sustainable and healthy food can drive demand for diverse food items, particularly those produced through climate-resilient and regenerative agricultural practices. This can increase farm resilience to climate change-related crop failures and enhance food security.
• Target 9c (Health): Promoting healthy diets through public procurement could contribute to improving nutrition and help build resilience against climate-related health impacts. This could help reduce morbidity and mortality, especially in vulnerable communities. Healthier and more resilient ecosystems due to reduced fossil fuel and chemical use also contribute to human health, in turn also increasing resilience to climate-related health impacts.
• Target 9e (Infrastructure): Sustainable food procurement can influence the development of resilient supply chains and food distribution infrastructure, ensuring essential services and minimizing climate-related disruptions.
• Target 9f (Livelihoods): Public procurement of sustainable foods can support local producers, smallholders, and food workers, enhancing adaptive social protection measures and reducing the adverse effects of climate change on livelihoods.

Biodiversity benefits

Public procurement can directly shift food production and consumption to more sustainable practices. This shift is expected to yield multiple benefits for biodiversity:

• Target 4 (Halt Species Extinction, Protect Genetic Diversity, and Manage Human-Wildlife Conflicts): Public procurement can create structural demand for diversified food products including indigenous, traditional, and underutilized species. Producers are then incentivized to utilize a greater diversity of species instead of focusing their production on a small number of species. This contributes to protecting the genetic diversity of species used for food production.
• Target 7 (Reduce Pollution to Levels That Are Not Harmful to Biodiversity): Public procurement can prioritize purchases of food from ecologically sustainable production such as agroecology or organic agriculture. This would increase demand for foods relying less on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and similar inputs. In this way, public procurement would help scale up practices that minimize pollution, avoiding impacts like eutrophication and soil acidification.
• Target 8 (Minimize the Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Build Resilience): Public procurement can give preference to food items so as to promote genetic diversity and regenerative practices that reduce pollution, including GHG emissions, ease pressure on land and water resources, and promote ecosystem health. This can improve the resilience of ecosystems and biodiversity to climate change impacts, while also mitigating climate change and its impacts in the long term.
• Target 10 (Enhance Biodiversity and Sustainability in Agriculture, Aquaculture, Fisheries, and Forestry): When prioritizing food that has been produced using practices and techniques that conserve and enhance agrobiodiversity and/or minimize impacts on freshwater and marine ecosystems, public procurement can create structural demand for food from sustainable production and improve the economic viability of sustainable food production.
• Target 11 (Restore, Maintain and Enhance Nature’s Contributions to People): By creating structural demand for food items from sustainable food production, public procurement can promote food production practices that conserve natural ecosystems and their ability to provide vital ecosystem services. This, in turn, can contribute to restoring, maintaining, and enhancing nature’s contributions to people.
• Target 14 (Integrate Biodiversity in Decision-Making at Every Level): Making biodiversity considerations a mandatory part of procurement decisions in the food sector from the production to consumption stage may provide an impetus to the integration of biodiversity in decision-making at every level by building capacity and the evidence base for the integrated assessment of supply chains in other sectors.
• Target 15 (Businesses Assess, Disclose and Reduce Biodiversity-Related Risks and Negative Impacts): Increasing the demand for sustainable and healthy food products through public procurement, including through biodiversity-related criteria, may induce businesses along the value chain to assess, communicate and reduce their impacts on biodiversity to comply with eligibility criteria, build trust in stakeholders and potentially gain competitive advantages.
• Target 16 (Enable Sustainable Consumption Choices To Reduce Waste and Overconsumption): Public procurement of sustainable foods provides consumers in various public spaces such as schools or hospitals with more sustainable food options. This facilitates consumers’ access to sustainable food and directly enables them to make sustainable food consumption choices.
• Target 18 (Reduce Harmful Incentives by at Least $500 Billion per Year, and Scale Up Positive Incentives for Biodiversity): Public procurement that prioritizes purchasing food from sustainable production such as agroecology or organic agriculture provides biodiversity-friendly food production with exclusive business opportunities. When awarding contracts based on the ecological sustainability of food production, public procurement directly scales up positive incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.
• Target 21 (Ensure That Knowledge Is Available and Accessible To Guide Biodiversity Action): Sustainable public procurement requires educating relevant stakeholders such as public procurers or consumers about sustainable practices and their biodiversity benefits, which helps make knowledge for biodiversity action available and accessible.

Other sustainable development benefits

Integrating healthy and sustainable diets in public procurement can support the delivery of multiple SDGs, since it can:

• SDG 1 (No Poverty): enhance income stability for smallholder farmers and marginalized producers by ensuring market access through institutional purchasing programs, especially in rural areas.
• SDG 2 (Zero Hunger): improve access to nutritious food, particularly for vulnerable populations, while supporting local production and the diversification of agricultural systems.
• SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being): reduce diet-related health issues by providing nutritionally balanced meals in schools and public institutions, fostering healthier eating habits.
• SDG 4 (Quality Education): improve learning outcomes by ensuring children receive adequate nutrition, which improves attention, cognitive development, and school attendance.
• SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): create jobs and stimulate local economies by strengthening food supply chains and supporting inclusive food markets that involve small-scale and family farmers.
• SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities): promote resilient urban food systems by fostering local food sourcing, reducing reliance on long-distance supply chains, and strengthening local governance.
• SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production): encourage sustainable production practices and reduce food waste by prioritizing local, seasonal, and minimally processed foods.
• SDG 13 (Climate Action): lower carbon footprints through environmentally conscious sourcing choices and procurement models that emphasize plant-based foods and reduce food miles.
• SDG 14 (Life Below Water): support sustainable fisheries by integrating responsibly sourced aquatic products into institutional meals and encouraging biodiversity-friendly procurement standards.
• SDG 15 (Life on Land): promote biodiversity and soil health by incentivizing agroecological practices and reducing pressure on land through more sustainable agricultural demand.

The effective integration of healthy and sustainable diets into public procurement systems relies on thoughtfully crafted and well-executed interventions. Yet, these efforts often face a range of technical and non-technical obstacles, along with potential unintended consequences and trade-offs that can hinder their success, including:

• A high level of bureaucracy (i.e., technical and administrative requirements) related to PFP can act as a barrier for engaging smallholder farmers and other SMEs.
• Socio-economic, political, and cultural sensitivities related to food consumption (See Introducing food-systems based dietary guidelines).
• Local SMEs may not have the same logistical infrastructure in place as large food companies, so if PFP prioritizes small suppliers over large ones, it may increase inefficiencies and costs.
• Difficulty in effectively identifying and directing resources towards the most food-insecure children and communities.

Incorporating the following measures into a unified and strategic framework can support the resolution of implementation challenges and help mitigate potential trade-offs:

• Technical assistance and technology sharing could help integrate SMEs (particularly rural smallholder farms) into the market and make conditions more favourable for their inclusion in PFP.
• Responsible infrastructural investments for food processing, transportation and storage can make working with SMEs more cost-effective.

Robust monitoring of the integration of healthy and sustainable diets into public procurement depends on well-defined indicators, reliable tracking tools, and structured frameworks that capture not only implementation progress but also associated impacts on biodiversity and climate.

Indicators to monitor biodiversity outcomes

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to a comprehensive set of headline, component, and complementary indicators for tracking progress toward the targets of the KM-GBF. Some of these indicators could also be functional for monitoring the implementation of this policy option. These indicators are:

Tools to monitor biodiversity outcomes

Not available

Tools to monitor climate outcomes

Estimated costs associated with the integration of healthy and sustainable diets into public procurement include:

• A study commissioned by the German Federal Food Ministry in 2018 showed that investing in healthier food in canteens would increase the cost of a meal by just four cents per meal. The study also found that the cost per meal decreases as the size of canteens increases.
• A sustainable school food programme in East Ayrshire, Scotland showed that one euro spent on sustainable school meals can generate an economic return to the local community of up to six euros through employment as well as environmental, health and social benefits.

Some notable examples of the successful integration of healthy and sustainable diets into public procurement include:

• Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme (PNAE) provides an example of a public procurement programme that links food security, education, rural development, and environmental sustainability. Since 2009, at least 30% of the budget must be allocated to purchase food from family farmers, with priority given to family farmers from the local municipality, land reform settlers, traditional communities and organic producers. In addition, the programme pays a premium of up to 30% for certified organic and agroecological products and gives priority to contractors with certified production. By creating structural demand for diversified food products and paying a price premium for certified organic and agroecological production, PNAE has increased farm-level agrobiodiversity and stimulated the use of agroecological practices. Moreover, the programme guarantees a market for around 120,000 family farmers by waiving the requirement for these farms to go through the bidding process.
• The Policy for Sustainable Development and Food of Malmö, Sweden is an example of how to implement SPP. Adopted in 2010, the policy aims to make high-quality food available in all public canteens, only procuring sustainable and climate-friendly products. As of 2023, the city has reached a rate of 70% organic food in public kitchens. Food-related GHG emissions were also reduced by 30%.
• Denmark is a prime example of successful public procurement of organic food. The country has combined public policy initiatives (e.g., procurement goals, financing, labelling and NGO capacity building) and organic sector initiatives (e.g. supply chain collaboration, organic schools for food service and education for kitchen workers).

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