Sustainability Transitions in University Food Service—A Living Lab Approach of Locavore Meal Planning and Procurement

Abstract

Due to its purchasing power, the public food service sector is viewed as a potential transformative driver towards sustainable food systems. Organic meal planning and regional procurement may be a vital implementation strategy towards Planetary Health Diets in the communal catering arena. Capable of unleashing desirable synergies within local foodsheds, this transition pathway can potentially benefit all stages of the value chain, while also positively influencing consumer dietary behavior. Transformation, however, poses complex challenges to caterers, as it demands a shift in mindset regarding the philosophy, organization, and management of cafeteria systems as well as the need for affordable and aggregated supplies of source-identified local organic foods. This action research case study engaged the public caterer of a German University, undergraduate students, and additional stakeholders in a Living Lab to develop a weekly farm-to-table cafeteria menu, including its actual preparation, based on a conceptual sustainability standard. Hence, through an iterative process, involving two feedback cycles, an ambitious set of nutritional and procurement criteria were devised, inspired by the external input from exemplary practitioners in the field of green cuisine and procurement. The resulting meal plan was then subjected to an evaluation vis-á-vis its compliance with (1) dietary recommendations, (2) seasonality, (3) organic certification, (4) a defined foodshed boundary, (5) budget neutrality, and (6) life cycle assessment.

The Importance of Food Attributes and Motivational Factors for Purchasing Local Food Products: Segmentation of Young Local Food Consumers in Hungary

“…product-related factors are discussed in [30][31][32][33] nostalgia for shopping, fun, and memories of old times [29] health consciousness [34][35][36][37][38] quality of life and well-being [39] emotional values and motivations [40] hedonic: culinary tourism [41,42] togetherness and novelty of food [43] health consciousness, e.g., nutritional value [34,35,42] taste, freshness [30][31][32] togetherness and novelty of food [43] tourism products as purely hedonic consumption experiences [44,45] effective ways of creating hedonic and memorable experience [46] self-rewarding experience [47] support for local farmers, producers and retailers [48][49][50] environmental and social motivation [51][52][53] environmental concerns [51,54] animal welfare, environmental sustainability, supporting rural communities [55] animal welfare [56] community-oriented motivations and motivations for participation in a community-supported agriculture scheme [41,[48][49][50]57,58] local heritage [59,60] community-oriented motivations…”

Sustainable Food Consumption and Production in the 21st Century

“…As an additional barrier, Kretschmer and Dehm (2021) mention the personnel costs arising from dealing with too many individual deliveries of fresh products from single farms or small enterprises. The higher effort and cost motivate procurement departments to aim for aggregated deliveries by a conventional wholesaler-which often however are not able to guarantee a local origin.…”

Overcoming the efficiency paradigm—The challenges of introducing local organic beef in canteens

“…Searching for new suppliers and integrating these new procurement processes into the overall management, introducing meals with new recipes into the regular planning, using fewer convenience products in the kitchen, and communicating the sustainable qualities of the local organic products to the kitchen staff and the canteen guests are time-consuming efforts, which are opposing the dominance of efficiency principles. The complex challenges for communal caterers that go hand in hand with a transformation toward sustainability are mentioned by several authors (Lopez et al, 2019;Kretschmer and Dehm, 2021). Kretschmer and Dehm (2021, p. 3) stress that "it requires not only a change in sourcing and procurement but also a shift in mindset regarding the philosophy, organization, and management of the respective canteen system.…”

“…In recent years the European Commission (EC) has developed environmental procurement criteria in the form of tools such as the Green Public Procurement (GPP) or the Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) agendas (European Commission, 2019). The criticism is often leveled that giving consideration to social and environmental criteria in procurement has so far been voluntary (Kretschmer and Dehm, 2021) and that this notion stands in contrast to the EC Treaty and other conventions that call for the "free movement of goods and equal rights for all market participants" (Krivašonoka, 2017, p. 1). Another problem is that in public institutions the management and decision-making for catering service delivery are often separated from the management of procurement contracts, which makes it difficult to broaden the perspective beyond cost efficiency toward sustainability aspects (Tregear et al, 2022).…”

“…Concerning the purchase of locally produced meat, only smaller suppliers were able to give reliable information about the farmers they purchase the meat from. Kretschmer and Dehm (2021) also mention the difficulty of precisely delineating what determines a local or regional product, since the term "of local origin" cannot be uniformly defined. It may be defined as a fixed geographical radius concerning a given location, or it may be defined as a certain district, province, state or country (Clancy and Ruhf, 2010).…”