Sustainable Development & Food Reinventing the school meal through public procurement practices: The case of Malmö

The importance of food on achieving sustainability has been a topic increasingly moved to the forefront of the international debate. Thus, governments from around the globe have developed and adopted comprehensive food policies aiming at sustainable development. As part of this, public procurement has been identified as a powerful tool leveraging government’s purchasing power and holding an interesting potential to re-shape the food markets. Simultaneously, the school meals program represents the ultimate arena where the addition of efforts striving for sustainable food systems has to find its culmination since it involves the wellbeing of the most vulnerable sector of the population. For this reason, it becomes important to understand the prevalent conditions determining the procurement decisions of school’s catering personnel regarding sustainable sound foodstuffs. The purpose of this thesis is to do an exploratory research of the preschool catering sector in Malmö in order to identify the conditions shaping their procurement decisions with a special focus on organic foodstuffs, resulting from the enactment of a policy for sustainable development and food on 2010. The findings of this investigation aim at providing a deeper understanding of the key factors influencing the purchasing behavior of the cooking staff and how this information can be further employed to motivate the sector towards the attainment of the policy goals. A desktop literature review on the topic, basic statistics and qualitative interviews with involved participants were collected in order to gain deeper insight on the case of Malmö. The information was then analyzed using a modified version of the GPP Hurdle Analysis tool developed by Günther & Scheibe (2006). It was identified that food indeed is in itself a powerful tool persistently involved on the core intrinsic concepts of sustainable development. Simultaneously, coupling the abilities of public caterers with sustainability concerns and applying those on the fertile arena of preschools via the meals program holds a promise that turns out to be more than appealing. If sustainable public catering efforts are applied together with a strategy to educate the youth so to raise their awareness and instill a mentality of sustainability through food, the cycle will be closed from both ends of supply and demand. Even when it seems unlikely that a universally valid strategy for overcoming obstacles for sustainable procurement on the catering sector can be developed, individual strategies can be designed as long as the proper information is made available and motivation is stirred adequately.