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America’s first-ever farm-to-institution food service cooperative wants to take over the University of Maine System’s dining services from Aramark. It’s a long shot. But they might just win by losing Tomorrow and Thursday, December 9 and 10, a small group of Maine food entrepreneurs, organizers, and activists will travel to the University of Maine’s flagship Orono campus. Their goal: to persuade the University of Maine System’s board of trustees that their organization, the Maine Farm & Sea Cooperative, should be granted the food service contract for six of the seven campuses that make up the University of Maine System. If their bid is accepted, they’ll be the nation’s first farm-to-institution food service cooperative to serve a university system on multiple campuses. It’s an audacious case to make. The current holder of the contract is Philadelphia-based Aramark, a global foodservice provider and facilities manager with 270,000 employees worldwide, revenues of just under $15 billion, and, among its client roster, 2,200 colleges, universities, and K-12 school districts. Aramark has held the $12.5 million contract with UMS for a decade, but it expires at the end of June 2016. The Maine Farm & Sea Cooperative has been in existence for less than half a year and has held exactly zero university food service contracts. Nonetheless, thanks to heightened awareness of local food and the financial impact of keeping the management—and the profits—of the food service contract in-state, the cooperative is a finalist for the contract. (UMS, as a matter of policy, has not revealed the other finalists, but they are widely presumed to be Aramark and Sodexo, a France-based company with 380,000 employees working at 34,000 sites in 80 countries and revenues of roughly $20 billion.) Tweet ThisA win for the co-op could change things far beyond Maine’s borders. Can Maine Farm & Sea win the contract? Not likely, though it’s not out of the question. But win or lose, the group has come forward with a new way of thinking about how local food producers and institutions can work together—one that will be talked about, imitated, and refined for years to come. They’ve added a new question that every local food advocate will need to start asking: Why work so hard to sell food into a system that doesn’t particularly want us, when we could take the system over and change it into something that benefits our customers, our region, and ourselves? Local producers can win the hearts of students, persuade the faculty, and inspire the administration, but in order to win a major university outsourcing contract, they need the procurement office to accommodate: When the office issues a request for proposals (RFP) asking potential vendors to explain why they should get the contract, local producers need it to be based on standards of judgment that give them a chance of succeeding. If the standards are all about cost and track record, the Sodexos and Aramarks are almost impossible to beat. In May 2015, the University of Maine signaled that it might be interested in making that kind of accommodation, when its board of trustees approved an environmental and safety procurement policy that in part allowed “reasonable preference when feasible for food goods produced sustainably, in a manner that minimizes transportation to the consuming location, or with other such environmental attributes or advantages as may be available in the marketplace, while balancing those benefits against price and other considerations.” The trick was to build that “reasonable preference” into the contracting process. In the months leading up to the August 2015 release of the RFP, Maine and New England-based advocates met with trustees and the procurement department to influence procurement policy. One stakeholder group emerged as a particularly influential player: the Maine Food for the UMaine System Coalition, which was organized by a steering committee that included Farm to Institution New England (FINE) and Real Food Challenge, and endorsers like American Farmland Trust, the John Merck Fund, Slow Money Maine, and the University of Maine Dining Services itself. The group’s representatives presented recommendations to the Office of Strategic Procurement and the Food Service Request for Proposal Committee in June. Among their priorities were: a commitment to 20 percent Maine food and 20 percent “real food” (defined by student-led Real Food Challenge as “local/community-based, fair, ecologically sound and humane food sources”) by 2020, the establishment of a food working group, transparency in tracking, and the initiation of supply chain partnerships with Maine producers. Tweet ThisIf the standards are all about cost and track record, the Sodexos and Aramarks are almost impossible to beat. It was clearly an opening for what was, at that time, not much more than a loose network of Maine food activists. “Part of what spurred Maine Farm & Sea to form was us forming this coalition to influence the RFP,” says Riley Neugebauer, Farm to College project manager at FINE. “I’m sure they had been brainstorming either way on things to be involved in, but this presented a unique opportunity. From there, they mobilized around the concept.” When in 2014, the University of Kentucky outsourced its foodservice operations to Aramark, food activists made an effort similar to the one made in New England, urging the university to buy 20 percent of its food from local producers. Aramark agreed to meet the goal and did…in Coca-Cola and ice. As the Lexington Herald-Leader reported in an article dated August 26, 2015, “In its first year on campus the company met the lofty goal by spending $2.3 million on locally produced and Kentucky Proud products, seemingly providing a major boost to local food economies.” “But nearly half of that money was spent on soft drinks and ice,” the article goes on to say, “including $1 million for The Coca-Cola Co., according to records obtained by the Herald-Leader under the state Open Records Act.” The danger of seeing a similar shortcut in other local-to-institution efforts lies very much in the details – of the RFP, that is. The definition of “local” really matters. Riley Neugebauer of Farm to Institution New England (FINE), the organization responsible for successfully getting its purchasing recommendations into the UMS RFP, says it anticipated the need for specificity. The final RFP language codified the meaning of “local” in terms of mileage and food product categories.
