Opportunities for local food procurement and school food programs in Ontario – research underway
Posted: June 25, 2025
Categories: GoodFoodBites / Local Procurement / News from Sustain Ontario / School Food News / Schools
Sustain Ontario is excited to partner with the Greenbelt Foundation, Schad Foundation, Wilton Consulting Group, SNP Central West Region, VON’s Ontario Student Nutrition Program Southwest Region, Children’s Foundation of Guelph and Wellington, Halton Food for Thought and Nutrition for Learning to explore opportunities for local food procurement and school food programs in Ontario, specifically within the Ontario Greenbelt but with the potential to adapt the learnings across the province.
Approximately half of the meals enjoyed by the more than 2 million children in Ontario each school day are eaten in schools. In 2023-24 Student Nutrition Programs that serve areas of the Greenbelt provided over 100 million meals and snacks to students. School Hospitality programs and school-run cafeterias offer additional sales opportunities. With the federal investment in a national school food program, more funding is now available and we anticipate that this funding will continue to increase. We are now looking to Ontario to increase its provincial funding to match the trend in other provinces. Combined with strong public interest in local food procurement, now is an opportune time to explore how to bring about more local procurement by schools in Ontario.
Over the course of this initiative, our multidisciplinary team is planning to explore the barriers, potential delivery mechanisms and efficiencies, infrastructure, and key relationships needed to help increase Greenbelt food products that are sourced for schools from local producers. This work will build on Farm to Cafeteria Canada’s partnership-based initiative Closing the Local Food Gap in Ontario as well as other research on this theme and will share its results before the end of 2025.
Specifically, this initiative is looking to:
- Identify best practices from school food programs in Ontario, other provinces and other countries.
- Scope current purchasing data about Student Nutrition Programs in the Southwest region and Central West region.
- Conduct interviews and survey research with key local agricultural producers and commodity groups.
- Conduct additional comparisons with other institutional food purchasing environments.
- Provide recommendations for policy makers to enhance local food procurement in school food programming.
- Identify potential pilot projects.
Schools offer tremendous potential for Greenbelt food producers, and can become a more stable and predictable market, while offering healthy local food for students. A 2021 FAO report stated that public food procurement in school food programs has become an important “game changer” to support and promote more sustainable food systems internationally. Globally, the US, Brazil, and France (among others) have put strong emphasis on local procurement in school food programs with positive results.
We’re excited about this initiative and look forward to sharing the results soon!
