Executive Summary

Every year billions of tax dollars go to public institutions to feed their communities, particularly vulnerable groups like children, the elderly, the incarcerated, and the sick. Unfortunately, the system used to buy that food—public procurement—is rigged by the corporations that dominate our food system. These corporations corner institutional procurement markets, using taxpayer dollars to consolidate power. Their stranglehold on this market means they get away with feeding low-quality food to vulnerable communities, exploiting their workers, and harming the planet—all to increase their profit margins.

Over the last decade, Food Chain Workers Alliance and HEAL Food Alliance have worked with grassroots leaders to challenge the corporate control of institutional procurement markets and replace it with a different model: values-based food purchasing. The mechanism for carrying out this strategy is the Good Food Purchasing Program. When public institutions purchase food according to community values, our taxpayer dollars contribute to a more democratic and equitable food system. By leveraging the power of big institutional contracts, we can demand that food corporations live up to our community values or make way for suppliers that will.

After successfully passing Good Food Purchasing Policies in ten cities—thereby influencing over $540 million in public food dollars—our members and close partners created the Good Food Communities (GFC) campaign to define the next iteration of our collective work. The GFC campaign builds on past successes by focusing on strengthening supplier transparency and justice for frontline workers and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)^[1] communities.^[2]

Methodology

FCWA and HEAL conducted in-depth, rigorous research from September 2021 to March 2023, gathering analyses from our diverse network of members, partners, and allies. This report draws from the lived experiences and testimonies of organizers and advocates on the ground, including 83 partner surveys of frontline food workers in production (FL) and warehousing (IL); case studies with farmers (MN), food aggregators (NY, NM), and processing plant workers (MO); as well 50 interviews with organizers, farmers, advocates, and academics. From this breadth of knowledge, we examine how public food procurement in its current form contributes to corporate exploitation, explore the origins of the Good Food Purchasing Program, spotlight the key role of grassroots leaders, and draw from a decade of lessons learned to make key recommendations for the road ahead.

By sharing this collective knowledge, we hope to strengthen the impacts of values-based food purchasing.

PROCURING FOOD JUSTICE:
GRASSROOTS SOLUTIONS FOR RECLAIMING OUR PUBLIC SUPPLY CHAINS | SPRING 2023

With gratitude for everyone who made this report possible:

Report research and production:

Winston Moore, Lead Researcher
Christina Spach, Food Chain Workers Alliance
Elizabeth Walle, Food Chain Workers Alliance
Jose Lopez, Food Chain Workers Alliance
Jose Oliva, HEAL Food Alliance
Tanya Kerssen, Real Food Media

Reviewers:

Laura Nussbaum-Barberena and Raj Patel

report layout and design:

Christina Bronsing-Lazalde, Real Food Media

ILLUSTRATED ARTWORK:

Emitxin

Contributors:

Neza Xiuhtecutli, Tommy Carden, Suzanne Adely, Mark Balentine, Doug Bloch, Anna Canning, David Chen, Leah Cohen, Sarah Grace Crowley, Dennis Derryck, Patrick Dixon, Katie Ettman, Axel Fuentes, Helga Garcia-Garza, Addisalem Gebrekidan, Ribka Getachew, Jessica Gilbert, Jakob Gilleylen, Dinesh Das Gupta, Riley Hite, Hannah Holmes, Sara Hoverter, Dakarai Howard, Stuart Karaffa, Navina Khanna, HeeWon Khym, Brenda Li, Annie Liu, Joann Lo, Shaun Martinez, Moses Momanyi, Julie Monrad, Lauren Newman, Dennis Olson, Magda Orlander, Taylor Pate, Anila Podila, Claire Schmitt, Tariq Sheriff, Sonia Singh, Bob Stumberg, Jessica Swan, Ian Warren, Elaine Waxman, Rebekah Williams, and Marlie Wilson.

Members of the Good Food Communities campaign:

Funder:

Panta Rhea Foundation

And appreciation for all our GFPP Partners:  

ASPCA, Berkeley Food Institute, Center for Good Food Purchasing, Change Lab Solutions, Chicago Food Policy Action Council, Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center, Community Food Advocates, DC Greens, Domestic Fair Trade Association, Farm Forward, Friends of the Earth, Institute for People Place & Possibility, Good Food Buffalo Coalition, Greater Cincinnati Regional Food Policy Council, Hope Collaborative, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, Land Stewardship Project, Los Angeles Food Policy Council, Massachusetts Farm to School, National Farm to School Network, Oakland Food Policy Council, Pittsburgh Food Policy Council, Policy Link, Real Food Media, San Diego Food System Alliance, SPUR, Teamsters, UFCW, Union of Concerned Scientists, Urban School Food Alliance, and other food system allies.

In our current food system, the workers who feed the country struggle to feed their own families. Over the last decade, food industry jobs accounted for seven of the ten lowest paying jobs in the United States.^[3]

These underpaid frontline food workers are predominantly people of color, women, and immigrants.^[i] In 2021, people in the United States spent more than $2 trillion on food.^[ii] Very little of that money, however, went to the roughly 21 million workers who ensured that food made its way to our tables. So where did that money go?

Whether we’re eating at home, school, work, or in a restaurant, a handful of corporations control the supply chains that feed us.^[iii] These corporations have seized control of our food system through consolidation and political lobbying to deregulate markets.^[iv] By following the money, we can see who holds the power in the food system—and how they maintain that power. This can inform our strategies to build a fair, equitable, and sustainable food system.

Of the $2 trillion spent on food in the United States in 2021, nearly half was spent on food eaten at home.^[v] Sixty-nine percent of grocery purchases were funneled through just four companies, with 34 percent going to Walmart alone.^[4] Those massive retailers source from food giants like PepsiCo and Nestlé, which dominate the markets for most of our favorite foods.^[vi]

When we think of eating out, we mostly think of restaurants. Though there are more than 600,000 restaurants in the United States, fast food chains take in about half of all restaurant industry revenue.^[vii] We also consume food at places like sporting arenas, museums, and amusement parks. The ten dollar hotdog you bought at the ballpark came from a Food Service Management Company (FSMC), most likely from one of what Real Food Generation calls “The Big Three.”^[viii] These three companies— Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass Group—dominate the supply chains for concession stands and cafeterias across the country. Together, their domestic revenue (about $30 billion per year) is more than twice that of the next 45 biggest FSMCs combined.^[ix]

The Big Three also largely control the food supply chains of taxpayer-funded institutions: public schools, hospitals, and city governments. These institutions use tax dollars to purchase food by “procuring” it through FSMCs or directly from food companies.

So how does procurement currently work? To procure its food, an institution first sends out a list of its needs.^[5] Next, suppliers enter a bidding contest, and whoever submits the “best” bid wins a contract to provide food for the institution. Depending on the institution’s size, these bids can be anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Just as we see in other markets, a select few food corporations control institutional procurement markets. Together, the Big Three make more than half of their $30 billion in revenue supplying food to schools and healthcare centers.^[x]

For so-called self-operated procurement, when institutions skip FSMC middle-men, contracts are largely with food giants like Tyson Foods and General Mills, which make about 29 percent ($13.7 billion) and 10 percent ($1.8 billion) of their sales (respectively) through food service contracts.^[xi] When FSMCs procure food for an institution, they contract out to those same mega-corporations for the foods they send to institutions.

Public institutions have limited budgets with which to procure their food and most are mandated to follow a “lowest cost bidder” or “lowest responsive and responsible bidder” requirement for their procurement process. This requirement means that once a potential supplier has met the institution’s basic needs, the institution must award the contract to the lowest cost bidder. Big suppliers’ legacy of procurement contracts provides them with strong relationships with institutions, as well as the money, infrastructure, connections, and logistical capacity to supply vast amounts of food. They’re also able to meet “lowest cost” requirements by sourcing food that’s mass produced, subsidized, under regulated, and unethical. The Reagan Administration helped normalize the lowest bidder mandate for procurement contracts. In 1986, New York City rejected a Kodak procurement contract because the corporation funded apartheid South Africa’s military, despite Kodak being the lowest bidder. The Reagan administration promptly withheld $500 million in federal funding from the city until it agreed to procure from Kodak.^[xii] The true cost of this cheap food is the exploitation of food workers around the world and colossal damage to our health and planet.^[xiii]

The market dominance of FSMCs and major corporations creates the perception that they’re the only possible sources of food for public institutions, allowing them to ignore public pressure to provide better wages, prices, services, or quality.^[xv] The lack of accountability engenders a cycle wherein power breeds more power, and an ever greater capacity to rig procurement markets—and our food system as a whole.

This report presents collective learnings of the Good Food Communities (GFC) campaign and its allies on how to break this vicious cycle by using values-based procurement to:

 

• hold corporations accountable for the exploitation in their supply chains, and

• replace exploitative corporations with suppliers who are building a sustainable food system.

Why Values-Based Procurement?

Public institutions collectively spend about $120 billion each year to procure their food.^[xvi] Those billions largely bankroll FSMCs’ and major suppliers’ control of the food system, allowing them to send low quality food to the most vulnerable among us: children, the sick, the incarcerated, and the elderly. To lower costs and increase profit margins, these suppliers exploit their workers and use extractive practices that disproportionately pollute BIPOC communities.^[xvii] However, if institutions adopt a values-based purchasing model, in which they change their procurement practices to reflect the values of the communities they serve, they can redirect billions of dollars toward building a more ethical food system.  As the Union of Concerned Scientists points out:

When these institutions set progressive standards for food procurement—for instance, requiring their suppliers to treat workers fairly, observe nutritional guidelines, and source food whenever possible from local farmers—they give a boost to the good food movement that can reverberate far beyond the populations they serve directly.^[xviii]

Values-based procurement programs like the Good Food Purchasing Program push institutions to direct their buying power toward creating a food system that is local, sustainable, fair, humane, and healthy.

Public institutions play a valuable role in the execution of values-based food purchasing. However, they are often removed from the workers, producers, and communities directly affected by the food they purchase and serve. Grassroots coalitions can make sure the experience and needs of those most impacted are heard. They ensure that transformation is felt by those on the ground, use their organizing capacity to pressure corporations, and help institutions stay accountable to the local community.

Knowing the critical role of organizing, FCWA launched a national campaign to support grassroots leaders in building coalitions across the country. Local coalitions include people with expertise ranging across the five values: community organizers, frontline food workers, labor leaders, farmers, policy advocates, public health officers, and animal welfare and environmental sustainability advocates. Recognizing that both internal and external strategies are required, the Center for Good Food Purchasing was founded in 2015 to provide implementation support and supply chain analysis to participating institutions.

The work soon spread, with coalition leadership proving critical to building multi-sectoral spaces, fostering grassroots organizing capacity, and centering the decision-making and leadership of frontline communities and workers. There are various examples of how coalition members with community organizing skills have played a key role in GFPP expansion and accountable implementation. In California, Oakland and Los Angeles modeled early victories for workers–blocking contracts with exploitative employers, and winning a policy to improve workers’ wages.

The food supply chain is extremely opaque and institutional procurement supply chains are no exception. Supplier transparency is critical to building fair and equitable supply chains: if institutions can’t access sourcing information, they can’t sufficiently assess their supply chains and if institutions don’t share sourcing information, Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) coalitions don’t know which suppliers to hold accountable for workplace violations. This absence of data impedes community and worker involvement as informed partners in GFPP implementation. 

Even after ten years of collective efforts, institutions are only able to obtain a sliver of the overall supply chain sourcing data—and rarely do they share this data publicly. This transparency deficit leaves large portions of the supply chain unaccounted for. Without farm-level sourcing data, for example, organizers can’t support institutions in determining whether farmworkers are treated fairly, nor whether the farms and the ingredients grown there are safe, ethical, or sustainable. For coalition partners and institutions trying to enforce labor standards, this lack of supply chain transparency forces them to rely on corporate-friendly certifications and limited government inspections that don’t cover all workplaces.^[xxiii] 

True supplier transparency will only exist when institutions require bidders and suppliers to provide all relevant supply chain data via their solicitations, bids, and contracts.  What’s more, this supplier data would need to be made publicly available, regularly updated, and include workplace names and addresses across the entire supply chain.^[6] Companies are unlikely to do this voluntarily. It will take significant public pressure to make data-sharing a requirement of doing business with public institutions.

With a mandate to continuously increase shareholder value, food corporations seek ever-higher profits and an ever-greater control of their industry.^[xxiv] Companies use this shareholder primacy mandate to justify profit-making endeavors that push the limits of what is legally permissible.^[xxv] In their quest for market dominance, accountability is a threat to their success. Corporations will not improve transparency on their own, and they will try to resist or de-fang any attempts to push them toward it.

As the Good Food Communities campaign pushes for increased transparency, we must stay vigilant of corporate strategies to derail our work. When corporations structure their business model to maximize profit margins, they simultaneously create structural roadblocks to transparency and accountability. Many companies claim that if they have to disclose their suppliers, rivals could use the information to undercut them and poach those suppliers. There is ample evidence that this argument doesn’t hold water.^[xxvi] When other plans to resist transparency fail, corporations often attempt to co-opt campaigns by championing the weakest, least enforceable policies.

Large food companies often obscure sourcing data through vertical integration. Vertical integration is a method of consolidating power in which corporations acquire full or partial ownership of each step in the supply chain of their product. The aim is profit, but one side effect is the obscuring of supply chains through a complicated network of subsidiaries. These complex supply chains create monitoring hurdles and obstruct institutions’ and coalitions’ ability to hold suppliers accountable to Good Food Purchasing Standards.^[xxvii][7] 

Corporations employ a number of tactics to keep their supply chains opaque. Those tactics generally follow two paths: overt conflict and covert resistance. The first path is outright opposition to calls for increased transparency. In this path, it is common for corporations to claim that they are unable to share supplier information because it would put them at a competitive disadvantage.^[8]

Corporations using this tactic will insist that if they share their supplier lists, competitors could sneak in and take those suppliers away from them. The prevalence of price-fixing in the industry, however, indicates that large food companies view their competitors less as threats and more as co-conspirators.^[i] In a recent case, the poultry industry paid over $50 million in settlements in the face of allegations that companies “agreed to share detailed data on [g]rower compensation with one another, with the purpose and effect of artificially depressing [g]rower compensation below competitive levels.”^[ii] This argument also falls flat in many rural areas where large companies like Tyson don’t need to compete for suppliers: once they’ve established regional dominance, corporations effectively control local job markets. Supplier farms are often too scared to sign a contract with Tyson’s competitors because they could risk getting blacklisted from local opportunities.^[iii]

The garment justice movement has battled this kind of overt corporate resistance for more than twenty years. In that time they’ve won major transparency and labor rights victories through organizing campaigns like the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry (Bangladesh Accord), and the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).

These campaigns have garnered widespread support from institutional buyers and labor organizations to make the cost of supply chain secrecy outweigh its benefits. By pressuring corporations with economic and legal consequences for non-compliance, these campaigns have pushed industry giants like Nike and Levi Strauss & Co to disclose their supplier data and take greater responsibility for the working conditions within their supply chains.^[i] If apparel brands can afford to share their factory names and addresses, food companies can and should do the same for their factories and farms when asked to do so by their institutional customers. 

When USAS first pushed Nike, the apparel maker resisted and sought to distance itself from suppliers.^[ii] In the face of new transparency pressure many food corporations are following Nike’s old playbook. By claiming ignorance of the abuses their suppliers commit, companies make it harder to prove that they intended to cut costs by exploiting workers. In the last two years, both Nestlé and Cargill have used their convoluted supply chains to beat lawsuits alleging their complicity in child trafficking in the cacao industry.^[iii] “The problem isn’t that [sourcing data] doesn’t exist,” said Anna Canning of the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network. “The problem is that corporations don’t disclose it.”

In recent years, numerous policy efforts around the world have aimed to force corporations to disclose their supplier data as a means of preventing abusive labor practices. Institutions can play an important role in promoting corporate transparency by requiring such disclosure in their food procurement policies.

With increasing demands for transparency, corporate executives are finding ways to co-opt those demands. Corporations engage in “covert” resistance to transparency by hiding behind meaningless certifications and employing toothless voluntary transparency models. Meanwhile, they lobby against transparency legislation that has the power to enforce mandates and consequences for non-compliance.

One way corporations and their interest groups co-opt transparency and regulatory initiatives is by volunteering to self-regulate via Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs.^[9] Because CSR models are self-regulatory, they allow corporations to set the terms of their disclosure–disclosing what they want, controlling the auditing bodies, and facing little to no consequence for non-compliance. Charity Ryerson, Director of the Corporate Accountability Lab, calls this type of volunteerism a “trap door” for transparency campaigns: corporations will comply only to the minimum degree possible, claim ignorance of abuses on their watch, and use these models to boost their public relations.

“I don’t give a shit if [the supply chains are] traceable.

Did you trace them, or did you not?

And did you release that information publicly?”

Charity Ryerson

Director and Founder of the Corporate Accountability Lab

Supply chain transparency is not an end goal, but rather a tool to build food worker and community power and to hold corporations accountable. To be truly transformative, a values-based procurement program will need each of these.

An effective enforcement body needs the authority and capacity to verify corporate suppliers are compliant with Good Food Purchasing Standards. This requires channels for reporting and investigating possible violations at every level of the supply chain. To ensure accountability, any auditing or enforcement body should be worker-led and must be accountable to an entity that is not the supplier. John Cartwright, former president of the Toronto Labour Council, explained that an auditing body should not answer to the direct purchaser either because “if there’s a violation, they don’t want to own up… so they sweep it under the rug.”

To ensure supplier compliance, corporations must face consequences for violations that outweigh the benefits of opacity and worker exploitation. For example, the International Accord for Health and Safety governing the garment and textile industry offers both market and legal consequences for violators. The Accord can force brands to cut ties with non-compliant factories and can take non-compliant brands to the international court of arbitration at the Hague.^[xlvii] To effectively leverage institutional procurement market power, values-based procurement programs need the capacity to deny or revoke contracts with suppliers and bidders that violate standards. 

During the summer of 2022, Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) surveyed 43 warehouse workers in the Chicagoland area whose employers are required to follow GFPP labor standards. Of the workers surveyed:

• 55 percent said they couldn’t afford to consistently feed their families due to low wages.
• 24 percent felt their employer did not respect their right to organize.
• 74 percent did not have employer provided health insurance.
• 21 percent felt their job was at risk if they called in sick to work.

Of the warehouse workers surveyed, 24 percent were temp workers. Employers tend to hire temp workers so they can cut costs by evading the protections guaranteed to full-time employees. WWJ’s surveys illustrate how that lack of protections affects temp workers’ day to day lives:

• 60 percent said they couldn’t afford to consistently feed their families due to low wages.

• 40 percent said their employers didn’t respect their right to organize.

• 90 percent did not have employer provided health insurance.

• 40 percent felt their job was at risk if they called in sick to work.

TOTAL WWJ WORKERS SURVEYED

SUBSET OF TEMP WORKERS SURVEYED

Without the assurance of full-time employment, temp workers are especially vulnerable to wage theft, discrimination, and poor working conditions.[i] Mark Balentine, Warehouse Workers for Justice organizer and former warehouse worker shared:

When I worked for the temp agencies, I would see them do wage theft all the time, pit Black and brown workers against each other, and retaliate against anyone who would speak out about what was going on.

 

Temporary staffing agencies bring a certain kind of person to that job, mostly people with criminal backgrounds. The agencies know they can do a lot under the table right in front of their eyes. They know because of the position the worker is in with criminal backgrounds they are going to brush it off because they have to keep a job in order to stay free. For the staffing agency, if someone doesn’t work out, ‘fine’ they say, ‘get rid of them, find another.’ They know another worker with a criminal background will be around real soon. Food companies that use bad agencies like Elite Staffing and also benefit from the Good Food Purchasing Policy should be looked at. Are they really good food companies if they abuse the workers who move their product?

Of all the workers surveyed who have faced retaliation from their employer, 100 percent report no longer feeling comfortable voicing concerns in the workplace. Surveyed warehouse workers shared how employers intentionally shortened hours, required difficult tasks, and created strenuous schedules. Retaliation also came in the form of termination in some cases. Arthur Morgan, a former worker at Rich Products in Illinois, said: “We have no say so in anything involving our safety or our labor laws… If you [stand] up to fight for your rights, they [try] to figure out a way to get rid of you… I think I was terminated because I didn’t make myself available to fill in for someone else’s duties.” Another warehouse worker in Chicagoland shared, “After three years, I worked on every machine in that [warehouse], and they fired me after I got injured.”

These injustices are why worker organizations, unions, and other labor allies want to use public procurement dollars as leverage to support frontline food workers and their fight for better wages and working conditions.

Tommy Carden, lead organizer at Warehouse Workers for Justice, detailed workers’ attempt to employ this strategy in Chicagoland:

During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, workers from Mars Wrigley came to Warehouse Workers for Justice (a Chicago-based worker center) seeking support in demanding stronger COVID safety precautions and hazard pay in their workplace. After worker leaders delivered a petition to management, they were subsequently fired in retaliation for exercising their protected right to organize. Through months of organizing, workers ultimately won limited hazard pay from their employers at third party logistics agencies.

 

As we dug into the company’s public contracts, we realized GFPP could be leveraged through relationships with local public officials. Given that Mars Wrigley is one of the companies supplying institutions participating in GFPP, this could be one tool in workers’ tool belts as they organize for better working conditions. This will take a strong base of workers, significant support from elected officials, and other points of leverage to bolster workers’ ability to hold their bosses accountable.

 

WWJ has so far been unable to use values-based procurement as leverage due to lack of transparency in institutional supply chain data, including incomplete data sets. Lack of transparency doesn’t only apply to which companies are doing business with the relevant government, but also how much money is at stake, and the length and terms of those contracts–all critical factors to know when attempting to understand current supply chains. Additionally, it has been difficult to engage workers around GFPP when workers have not seen it used effectively as a tactic, it’s a complicated program to understand, and explaining how GFPP works can be convoluted.

When institutions adopt a Good Food Purchasing policy, as they have in Chicago, it should provide supply chain workers an opportunity to hold their corporate suppliers accountable. Policy adoption will not, however, benefit workers unless public institutions make their supply chains publicly transparent. Until then, food workers and worker organizations like WWJ won’t be fully equipped to use values-based procurement as an organizing strategy to improve wages and working conditions.

As GFPP expands its reach to new institutions, it expands its potential to protect workers in some of the least transparent sectors of the food system. In Gainesville, Florida, policymakers and procurement officials are beginning to embrace values-based procurement. This development is opening up an opportunity to build supply chain transparency and worker protections for a group that has little of either: farmworkers.

Basic worker protections like the right to organize are the foundation of GFPP labor standards. If enforced, these standards could be especially relevant to farmworkers, like those in Florida, who are not afforded the right to organize under federal or state laws.^[1]

To show how critical such protections could be, Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, General Coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida (FWAF) shared his analysis of farmworker exploitation in Florida:

Farmworkers are among the most vulnerable workers in the U.S. Most are immigrants and about two thirds are undocumented. The fear of deportation prevents many of them from reporting abuses and violations against their health and safety. Although DOL, OSHA, and EPA officials assert that complaints will not be reported to immigration authorities, farmworkers are wary of those assurances. Additionally, while their complaint may be confidential, it is not anonymous, and they worry about retaliation.

Unable and unwilling to share their negative work experiences, many farmworkers are left open to undue exposure to excessive heat and pesticides. In the heat, their bodies become dehydrated and can suffer kidney damage. Over time, they may develop chronic kidney disease and hypertension. These conditions are further worsened by field conditions such as lack of access to a bathroom, and agriculture’s reliance on the piece-rate system in which workers are paid based on the amount of harvest they pick. Under that system, farmworkers are essentially competing against themselves and against other workers. Every time they stop to get a drink of water or use the restroom, they see it as money they are not earning and the person next to them is picking and making what they would be making. When asked why they did not stop for a break, workers often cite working by the piece rate and wanting to make more money by continuing to work.

Another issue that farmworkers face is exposure to pesticides. The Worker Protection Standard regulates the use of pesticides and has a long list of requirements related to pesticide use. However, one of the more important areas of attention is the fact that pesticide labels are only printed in English, and not in Spanish too. In Florida, they should also be printed in Haitian Creole. Additionally, workers report that pesticides are being applied in adjacent fields where they are often exposed through pesticide drift, which occurs when the mist of pesticide application is carried in the wind and exposing workers in those adjacent fields. Workers often report finding a white dust on the plants following a field being sprayed with pesticides. This is essentially pesticide residue that settles on the leaves of plants. When workers walk in the fields, this residue gets on their clothes and skins. Skin rashes are common for farmworkers who have been working in a field recently sprayed.

of the FARMWORKERS SURVEYED:

Of the farmworkers surveyed:

• 58 percent said they couldn’t afford to consistently feed their families due to low wages.
• 30 percent said performing their job put them at risk of harm.
• 0 percent had employer provided health insurance.
• 28 percent said their employer did not respect their right to have a workplace free from retaliation.

As Xiuhtecutli mentions above, farmworkers are especially vulnerable to abuse. Compared to workers in other sectors of the food industry, they are less likely to speak English and more likely to be undocumented—and in the case of H-2A workers, more likely to have their US residence dependent upon work. This vulnerability means that even though they are more likely to suffer from poor working conditions, stolen wages, discrimination, and retaliatory abuse, they are less likely to voice their concerns over these issues.^[xlix] Nonetheless, of all the workers surveyed, farmworkers were 50 percent more likely than warehouse workers to report retaliation for voicing workplace concerns to their employer. Thirty-seven percent of surveyed farmworkers listed health and safety concerns, citing dangerous working conditions, pesticide exposure, and dirty drinking water.^[11]

These many workplace dangers highlight the need for better mechanisms through which farmworkers can organize. While GFPP standards offer the potential for such mechanisms, right now, without transparency, monitoring and enforcement, and consequences for violators, those protections do not exist. Yesica Ramirez, a FWAF organizer in the Apopka area, commented:

In this specific community of farmworkers who pick strawberries and chiles, we see Indigenous people [who are] more vulnerable to any kind of violation. [GFPP] would be spectacular for them, as they are doubly unprotected. But, the process is not short. If you hear about it once you don’t immediately understand the Program. While we organize with [farmworkers] and gain their trust, we’ll also have to use that time as an opportunity for them to learn more about this program—how they would benefit and how they can support it.

The Smithfield Foods processing plant in Milan, MO supplies public institutions across the country, including those in GFPP Supply chains. Although this plant is part of supply chains covered by the fair labor standards of the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), these protections aren’t currently enforced and working conditions can be deadly. Brave workers shared what it’s like on the inside.^[12] According to Fatima, “No amount of money can pay me for my health. I have urinary infections because of this job. I also have a lot of stress because of work. I developed tachycardia because of all the stress.” Katrina added, “We put our safety on the line and we come out with long-term injuries. I left with a messed up shoulder, with gout, and carpal tunnel. There’s no amount that they can pay us to be robots for them.”

Three interviewees—Consuelo, Katrina, and Fatima—worked for Smithfield as trimmers, skinners, and packers. María, the fourth interviewee, worked for Packers Sanitation Services Inc (PSSI), which Smithfield and other meat processing companies regularly contract to clean their facilities. Both employers have a record of worker exploitation—with more than 300 OSHA violations combined over the last decade. Still, that record only reflects a small fraction of the workers’ rights abuses these companies commit.^[l] As María told us:

The chemicals they use are very harmful. My coworkers and I have chemical burns. We have problems with our lungs. I understand they want everything disinfected, but it’s killing us… If we didn’t finish cleaning the machines as we were supposed to, we got written a warning. If you got three warnings… you got suspended for three days. On the fourth warning, you got fired… Not being able to move the machines on my own was a big safety issue, because we had to make creative ways in trying to get our jobs done… They demand so much from us. They want us to be safe, but they are asking for us to go faster and faster. So workers have to take small shortcuts to get the work done. Then they blame the workers for having the accident.

Another anonymous worker added:

My [family member] and I work there… I’m giving you [a pseudonym] because I’m scared of what this company can do. Sometimes I want to use my real name, but I’m scared.

In our full case study, worker testimonies show how GFPP standards aren’t being upheld in the Milan plant and why coalitions and institutions need workers’ analysis. The case study also highlights an opportunity to hold suppliers to publicly-funded institutions accountable. As workers organize for better protections, there’s a critical role for allies outside their workplaces to amplify worker demands and exert pressure on companies like Smithfield to address them.

Corporate exploitation of vulnerable workers in public food supply chains extends beyond the United States. This is especially true in the Global South, where free trade policies drive a “race to the bottom” when it comes to labor, environmental, and safety standards. Corporations like Nestlé cut their expenses by using forced, trafficked, or child labor. Because exploitation is so rampant, the Global South is often at the vanguard of organized resistance movements for worker protection and corporate accountability. Unions and worker organizations in Pakistan, for example, were leaders in expanding the protections of the Bangladesh Accord into the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry. The international peasants’ organization La Vía Campesina (LVC) has spearheaded the food sovereignty movement to build (among other things) worker control, gender equity, and sustainability in the food system.^[13] LVC’s work led to the United Nations’ adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which represents a breakthrough in potential legal protections for agricultural workers and communities around the world. As long as corporations can chase cheap labor from one country to the next, all efforts to secure worker protections and corporate accountability must consider the global scale of the problem. These and other Global South-based movements are important models we should learn from to secure justice and accountability in US food systems.

Of the workers WWJ surveyed, only 21 percent knew of GFPP and only 7 percent knew they were in public supply chains covered by GFPP labor protections. Frontline workers must be made aware of what GFPP is, and be informed when they are employed by companies required to uphold the GFPP labor standards. With supplier transparency, worker organizations and partners can begin identifying workers covered by GFPP and informing those workers of what that GFPP coverage means for them. In the Program’s baseline labor standards, employers can be held accountable to following US labor laws and the International Labor Organization standards to ensure:

• no forced or child labor;
• no workplace discrimination (based on employment or occupation); and
• protection of workers’ right to organize.

Current values-based enforcement relies on violations filing systems that corporations can manipulate to diminish or erase evidence of worker exploitation. Corporations regularly settle informally with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to erase serious violations with heftier fines. Because OSHA lacks the capacity to prosecute most violations they find, they avoid litigation by offering informal settlements to violating companies. Minimizing violations is a matter of corporate policy and it’s cheaper to pay down federal violations than to ensure consistent worker safety. Case in point is Tyson Foods’ $127 million in an escrow account earmarked explicitly to pay for such settlements.^[li] By settling violations up-front, they also dodge long-term market consequences in programs such as GFPP, which only keeps track of more serious violations. Furthermore, OSHA isn’t allowed to audit farms with fewer than ten workers and the vast majority (96 percent) of workers on animal agriculture operations don’t have access to OSHA protections.^[lii] These factors make it difficult for institutions to hold suppliers accountable.

Workers’ perspectives, strategic analysis, and organizing become all the more valuable when corporations obfuscate safety data. Where other regulation fails, workers can provide critical insight on working conditions in supply chains. If they are ready to hear those insights, institutions can ensure that violators aren’t rewarded with new contracts. This type of collaboration has enforcement potential if it can build worker familiarity with—and confidence in—values-based procurement as an organizing strategy. It also supports solidarity among workers, coalitions, institutional partners, and policymakers.

Of the 83 workers surveyed for this report, nearly everyone wanted their community and those outside their workplace to stand in solidarity with frontline workers and in defense of workers’ rights. These kinds of alliances can amplify workers’ collective power and increase pressure when organizing for better wages and conditions.

According to the survey results, workers are interested in two categories of support from allies:

1. sharing information on workers’ rights, relevant policies, and required health and safety protections; and
2. building broad support for strikes, walkouts, and unionization.

Holding suppliers accountable requires that we listen to those who know workplace conditions best: workers. Food workers aren’t just witnesses to labor abuses, they’re often familiar with the business practices concerning other GFPP value categories, such as animal welfare and environmental sustainability. When workers are connected to the broader GFPP network, their knowledge can help coalitions and institutions identify violations that wouldn’t otherwise be known. In order to use GFPP as an organizing tool, and to help enforce its standards, food workers need support from an engaged network of coalitions and public institutions that will connect the dots of the supply chain, lean on worker testimony and analysis when evaluating progress, and set up consequences for suppliers that violate workers’ human rights. By supporting workers in this way, we can increase transparency and improve enforcement for each of GFPP’s value categories.

As corporate consolidation leads to only a handful of companies controlling large portions of our food supply chains, small-scale farmers face anemic marketplace options.^[14] Attempts to keep up leave many farmers stacked with debt and with fewer choices regarding what they grow and how they grow it.^[liii] BIPOC farmers and businesses face additional challenges in securing financial support to start up or grow due to historical, political, and institutional discrimination.

The United States has passed racist policies ensuring that BIPOC communities, including producers and distributors, have less access to capital and land.^{[liv] [15]} As a result, BIPOC communities face significantly higher food insecurity than White communities, because they have less wealth, less access to healthy, affordable food, and fewer resources with which to address those issues.^[lv]

Addressing these inequities requires a shift in power in which BIPOC communities define and control their own food and agricultural systems. BIPOC producers and distributors, who for generations have been organizing in their communities, are fundamental to that shift in power. The HEAL Food Alliance argues:

For many that have been systematically left out of the food system and often borne the brunt of a food system that was designed to amass wealth through their oppression, growing food on their terms and ensuring the communities’ access to it, is in itself a radical political act. The majority of BIPOC producers today are politically motivated by the need to fight for a more equitable, and ecologically sound food system and reclaim their connections to the land that has been historically denied to them. They use their position as providers and their land access to create space for learning, healing and resisting.^[lvi]

Supporting small-scale BIPOC producers’ and distributors’ entry into procurement markets helps to create a sustainable, values-based system by building food sovereignty. This section and the case studies that follow demonstrate: how BIPOC producers and distributors are tackling inequity within their own communities; and the potential for BIPOC communities who control their food systems to lead the movement to transform our current exploitative food system.

“I told the USDA, I’m sick and tired of you calling us ‘disadvantaged.’ Why are we disadvantaged? Why don’t you ask that? We’re disadvantaged because our land was stolen, our water became a commodity bought and sold, [and] our seeds were contaminated. If we’re disadvantaged, it is for those reasons.”

Helga Garcia-Garza

Director of Agri-Cultura Co-operative Network

The United States and its food and agricultural systems are built upon land and labor stolen from Indigenous and Black communities over the course of the last 500 years.^[16]

That legacy of brutality extends into the current agricultural system. The defining features of this system—its fixation on productivity, its dependence on chemical inputs, and its preference for giant farms—are founded upon policies that were intentionally crafted to socially disadvantage BIPOC producers. Estimates show that the USDA’s discriminatory policies have robbed Black farmers of more than $300 billion worth of land in the last century alone.^[lvii] New Deal legislation like the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and other policies shaped the current agricultural system by dismantling programs that aided small-scale Black farmers, while sending massive subsidies to large-scale White farm owners.^[lviii] The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was designed specifically to exclude BIPOC workers from labor protections.^[17] Nearly 80 years of policies, from the Bracero Program, to NAFTA, to criminalizing immigration through policies like Operation Streamline have all worked to engender a food system that is dependent upon the exploitation of Latine labor.^[18]

The consequences of these policies have been disastrous for BIPOC producers and our food system as a whole. Over the last 100 years Black farmers have gone from operating 14 percent of farms in the United States to 1.7 percent today, losing nearly 90 percent of farmland over that same time.

The USDA has continued to systematically deny Indigenous and Black farmers access to loans and protections that would allow them to build wealth and have a larger say in our food system.^[lix] Meanwhile a select few corporations have grabbed ever growing control of the food system. These same corporations have wrested control of our public procurement supply chains and are deeply invested in maintaining that control.

Centuries of racist policies and discriminatory barriers to accessing land and capital have cut BIPOC farmers out of food and agricultural markets. Today, BIPOC people make up less than 5 percent of farm owners nationwide, while BIPOC people constitute a majority of farm workers overall and nearly 40 percent of the US population.^[lx] As a result, BIPOC producers are less represented in institutions currently practicing values-based procurement and have difficulty accessing those institutional contracts.

Dennis Derryck, founder of Harlem-based Corbin Hill Food Project, explained that addressing this lack of representation in agriculture is “a huge long-term project that involves investment over the next 20 years or so.” Derryck further explained that New York State has 57,000 farms, but only 139 of them are Black-owned.^[lxi] Despite actively looking, Corbin Hill has no consistent Black farmers in its supply chain.

Discriminatory lending and land ownership policies hold back more than 200,000 BIPOC producers operating in the United States, who work on smaller farms and make less money than the average farmer.^[lxii] Scaling up to meet the requirements of procurement bids involves considerable risk for these producers and distributors.

Helga Garcia-Garza, director of the Albuquerque-based farmer-owned cooperative food aggregator, Agri-Cultura Cooperative Network (ACN), recounted, “I always say the farmer takes the biggest risk, because [they have] to invest months of work and capital before [they see] any type of income out of it.” BIPOC farmers are well aware of the barriers they face in accessing these markets: from certifications and infrastructural investments to in-club supplier pipelines and the legacy of racist agricultural policies that work against them.^[lxiii]

Black-led Corbin Hill’s status as a virtual organization is a shrewd strategy to navigate the financial barriers they face. System-wide, Black-owned small businesses receive smaller loans and are rejected more often than their White-owned counterparts.^[lxiv] Derryck explained: “When we started off, we were very successful. We went from 190 shareholders to 1,100 in three years, so then they started to gouge us.” The storage facility they initially rented suddenly increased the rent by 50 percent. The state offered them money to build a facility, but according to Derryck, “You don’t want to know the percentages of what we had to put up for every dollar we needed to borrow. It’s an embarrassment in terms of racism and capitalism.” By becoming a virtual organization, Corbin Hill eliminated its need for a storage facility, shifting that burden of infrastructure onto institutions and the White farmers they source from.

The price point that institutions set for their produce adds another barrier for small-scale BIPOC farmers. “The prices are just low!” shared Moses Momanyi, co-founder of Dawn2Dusk farm, in Afton, Minnesota. “They’re buying at 80-95 cents per lb., [when] a bunch of radishes at the farmers market is $3 [for roughly 1 lb.].” For many of these producers, institutions’ expectation for low wholesale prices is an immediate deal breaker. This is why, in the unincorporated South Valley of Albuquerque, the farmers who comprise ACN’s board of directors always set their own prices. Garcia-Garza explained the importance of setting this hard line for institutions:

They wanted all this, this, and this from us, and I said “Well, where’s your commitment to it? You’re putting this all on the farmer, but y’all have made no commitment.” They were saying, “We can pay [ACN’s set price], but we have to be assured that the price will come down once you start doing your wholesale.” I said to them, “We will never, ever sell our carrots for 32 cents a pound. That’s never, ever going to happen.” [It’s critical] for them to understand that, because they can’t let go of the Sysco [corporate] mindset.

For many farmers, the upside of institutional contracts is stability. It offers a guaranteed income, without the year-long hassle of marketing and driving back and forth from the farmers market. For small-scale BIPOC farmers, though, the barriers of entry into the market make an institutional guarantee a risky gamble, especially for a deal with a partner you may not trust. Institutions can work to gain the trust and buy-in from small-scale BIPOC farmers by building connections with farmers and lending support on the risky investments that farmers need to scale up.^[lxv]

Momanyi described the barriers he faced as an immigrant farmer who wanted to gain access to markets in his new country:

Most immigrants will come, they’ll end up in the cities… They have a language barrier, cultural barriers. So even the ones who think of doing farming, they can’t. My friends tell me the same stories that I had. You get in a car, and drive around the country, admiring the livestock, but “Who am I going to even talk to to do this?” That’s a system that is automatically not favoring you.

Discriminatory policy has advantaged White producers and distributors for generations, allowing them to build the capital, the capacity, and the connections needed to dominate each link in procurement supply chains. As the Good Food Communities concept paper notes:

Given the food system’s size and consolidated power, large food service companies are able to propose low-budget contracts that institutions often find too attractive to resist… This practice incentivizes food management companies’ use of large vendors and means that they often exclude vendors who are not able to pay rebates^[19]—such as small farmers—from their lists of preferred vendors. Such rebates have been a topic of several public investigations and proposed legislation to discourage the practice.

In 2020, Garcia-Garza was appointed chair of New Mexico’s historically White and big-ag led Food and Agriculture Policy Council, where she saw firsthand the mechanisms that create racial inequity within procurement supply chains:

I asked for the data [for procurement contracts]. Who bought from whom? Who ends up with the contracts? The three privileged White farmers that already had a monopoly on everything because they “work with organic methods.” Well, so do all of us [ACN’s BIPOC producers], but because they had that longevity of farming, they also had the capital, the land, the resources, the labor, and they had their white skin privilege.

As Garcia-Garza and others at ACN worked to bring awareness to these structural advantages, they faced even more discrimination. “I get called ‘aggressive’ a lot,” recalled Jessica Swan, the community outreach specialist for ACN. Garcia-Garza explained how other council members tend to squirm in their seats when she enters the room: “I’ve got a reputation. They can’t push language through and it’s just going to be accepted.” Without that constant activism, she explained, “it would have been same old, same old.”

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Dawn2Dusk farm had just signed a contract with Minneapolis Public School District to deliver 400 lbs./week of radishes. When the school district cut its deliveries by more than 80 percent, the burden fell on Dawn2Dusk. Momanyi explains:

Most of what we were supposed to be delivering was for the summer program, and there were no kids… You write an invoice, it’s [only] $80… “We specifically grew this one watermelon radish for the school district that we couldn’t take there… When you’re told you need 400 lbs. of radishes for the next ten weeks, you’re actually buying those seeds ahead of time, and you’re setting aside a space for that [on the farm].

Worried that backing out of the contract would reflect poorly on Dawn2Dusk, Momanyi was stuck making long deliveries that barely covered the cost of gas.^[20] Momanyi initially entered into this contract as a teaching experience for his farmer-training program, but he found, “the following year when I was expecting the farmers to say ‘let’s do it again,’ none of the farmers were interested.” While Momanyi understands the school system’s difficult situation, this experience made him and his trainees wary to attempt any similar contracts:

This would be one success story to do this and lock in that contract over the years. It would be known to the community that “See? They were able to get such a contract, they get that every year, they can count on that.” So this year that RFP was put out, but I felt that I’ll revisit that later when I know that we’re done with COVID.

In NYC, Derryck explained COVID’s impact on Corbin Hill’s farmshare program, which distributed food to low-income communities through sites at their local institutions: “Pre-COVID we had 19 sites. Overnight we went from 19 to three… [Those sites], our clinics, our hospitals, our schools, were the first to close and the last to open.”

Corbin Hill’s sites were replaced by what Derryck calls “the charity and free food industrial complex.” Derryck explains that COVID and its accompanied spike in food insecurity were met with “unprecedented federal and local funding… [which increased the] flow of free food into communities, mostly facilitated via infrastructure owned and operated by large charity organizations.”

This model threatens Corbin Hill and others like them because it re-channels surplus food, community services, and grant-money through a handful of food hubs that already have hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Derryck explained:

We can’t compete with them… Every place I turn around in my community there’s free food. There is no sovereignty in it, you don’t have choices… so you walk around the corner from the delivery point, you find half of it thrown out onto the sidewalks. The inner bones of our community are being destroyed… our prediction is even a year from now farm stands are not even going to survive because you can get free food down the block… I believe [during the height of the pandemic, free food is] necessary, but it’s absolutely not sufficient. …Charity is never there to deal with structure. Charity is what’s given to you. You don’t have a say about it. There’s been no evaluation on [these programs] in terms of health outcomes, or in terms of the community in which they’re distributing the food, nothing.

Similar systems have been enacted in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico. ACN’s Swan refers to this model as “farm to food bank,” stating:

These people are coming into our neighborhoods telling us that we need help, and telling us that this is all we deserve to eat… that’s not what I want my elders eating, or anybody who’s considered “at risk”… and you’re putting small businesses out of business because you came in to “save the community.”

When COVID-19 hit the South Valley, food security shot up, and new food banks and other food assistance delivery programs came in seeking to “save the community.” Backed by funders looking to address rising hunger, these organizations rose to prominence without the type of community support they’d normally need to succeed in the area. But because they weren’t from the community, neither were their solutions. “They didn’t have to build it, or organize the farmers. They bought it, and now they want to sit here and talk about ‘community’… and ‘their farmers’… and lead the equity talk,” said Garcia-Garza.

This phenomenon mirrors another major threat to community control in the South Valley and elsewhere: gentrification. These organizations may have a lot of money and good intentions, but they haven’t taken the time to build relationships needed to gain the trust and support of the South Valley, so they have to import their solutions from elsewhere. Meanwhile, money and opportunities dry up for small organizations with strong ties to the community. Instead of “solving the problem,” these outsider organizations extract power and decision making from the community, reducing food sovereignty.

 “People are quick to recommend “training” as a solution to issues faced in Black and brown communities, but training alone is insufficient. Give me access and I’ll train myself.”

DENNIS DERRYCK

Founder of Corbin Hill Food Program

Despite our best efforts, workers are still being exploited, BIPOC farmers are excluded from institutional contracts, and the public often doesn’t know who’s supplying their local institutions. We have to go beyond the aspirations of GFPP to shift power to frontline workers, impacted communities, and small-scale BIPOC producers. That’s why the Good Food Communities campaign was launched: to protect workers’ human right to organize, build support for BIPOC producers, win supply chain transparency, and secure stronger environmental protections.^[22] In order to do this, we need the following:

ENFORCEMENT AND CONSEQUENCES:

Mechanisms that equip institutions with tools to enforce the GFPP standards and create consequences for suppliers who are in violation.

TRANSPARENCY:

Public access to food sourcing data illuminating the entire supply chain.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

Institutions that treat coalition partners and frontline workers as core partners in program implementation.

RACIAL EQUITY:

New pathways that expand market access and ensure beneficial contracts for small-scale BIPOC producers and distributors.

As we strategize how best to achieve these goals, we look to our fellow organizers, workers, activists, researchers, community leaders, and institutional partners who have been pushing the envelope on values-based procurement for years. In particular, our research on enforcement, building consequences, and supplier transparency led us to review prevailing wage policies, Sweatfree purchasing campaigns, and worker-led certifications. Below is a summary, with the full version here, of our key findings:^[lxvi]

• Entities responsible for enforcement are separate from those in charge of purchasing contracts.
• Workers have access to an anonymous grievance process.
• Labor violators in the supply chain face consequences.

• Workers in participating supply chains are informed of their rights.
• Workers and community members are crucial to evaluating suppliers.
• Supplier data detailing supply chain sourcing is made public.

ENFORCEMENT, CONSEQUENCES, AND ACCOUNTABILITY

The following recommendations offer tools to: lift barriers to values-based purchasing; create institutional enforcement mechanisms with meaningful consequences for suppliers violating Good Food Purchasing Standards; and center community partners in decision making processes.

01 // Removing Barriers to Values-based Purchasing

Lowest responsible bidder mandates are prevalent across the country. These mandates prevent institutions from considering criteria other than cost. Values-based procurement seeks to consider additional factors when assessing prospective suppliers, such as bidders’ labor practices, treatment of farm animals, geographic location (relative to the institution), and land stewardship. In addition to good food policies, further legislative change may be needed to ensure that institutions aren’t required to default to the lowest bidder. Defining and passing best value procurement codes enables local communities and institutions to explicitly define the values that guide their food purchasing.

02 // Redefining What It Means to Be a Responsible Supplier 

The term “responsible bidder” implies that the supplier sources its food responsibly. In practice, it means little more than the supplier being capable of supplying the foods requested. This ignores, for instance, how the food was grown or how workers and animals in the supply chain were treated.

03 // Creating Consequences for Suppliers

Labor violators in institutional supply chains must face consequences in order to be motivated to comply with values-based purchasing.

04 // Building a Community Advisory Council to Enforce Values-Based Procurement

Without an organized base of community support, the burden of accountability and enforcement falls on institutional food program administrators who may not have the capacity necessary to track, manage, and deliver on GFPP implementation. Institutions can center grassroots leadership and decision-making power by establishing a community advisory council. A community advisory council would ideally enforce GFPP standards autonomously from institutional procurement teams and report directly to the governing bodies of their institution.^[25] To ensure equitable access and participation, we recommend councils be BIPOC-led, reflect the communities served by the institution, have deep knowledge of all GFPP values, and provide food and childcare to all members as needed.

CONCLUSION

Our global food system is designed to extract resources and labor from vulnerable communities in the name of profit. Billions of tax dollars are spent every year on procurement contracts that uphold this system, benefiting corporations that restrict processing plant workers’ access to bathrooms, give dirty water to fieldworkers, and squeeze local BIPOC producers out of their own markets.

The sheer amount of money spent on public food procurement presents a major opportunity to leverage our buying power to transform the food system. This report has demonstrated that there is widespread support and momentum for values-based purchasing—if only we listened to the voices of those most impacted by food system injustices and followed their leadership.

Here’s what we know we need:

ACCOUNTABILITY

Coalition partners and frontline workers upheld by institutions as core partners in program implementation.

• Companies have a long track record of resisting accountability. Our success depends upon strong collaboration among grassroots coalitions, public institutions, and policymakers. We also have a collective responsibility to frontline workers and communities most impacted. Workers need broad support to hold suppliers accountable to protecting their rights in the workplace.

 

ENFORCEMENT AND CONSEQUENCES

Mechanisms that equip institutions with tools to enforce the Good Food Purchasing Standards and create consequences for suppliers who are in violation.

• We need to pass policies that lift barriers to values-based procurement, redefine responsible bidding, create escalating consequences like cutting contracts, and create community advisory councils that can support enforcement.

TRANSPARENCY

Public access to food sourcing data illuminating the entire supply chain.

• Full transparency is critical at every level of the supply chain. Suppliers must be required to share their data, ensure public access to that data, and inform workers when they’re covered by GFPP fair labor standards. The more transparent supply chains are, the fewer opportunities there will be for companies to exploit workers and communities without repercussions.

RACIAL EQUITY

New pathways that expand market access and ensure beneficial contracts for small-scale BIPOC producers and distributors.

• We need infrastructure for alternative suppliers who treat their workers with dignity and care for the planet. Grassroots leaders like Helga Garcia-Garza, Dennis Derryck, and Moses Momanyi have built alternative means of producing food and distributing it to their communities—in a way that builds community health and power. We can invest in infrastructure that supports and expands public contracting access for BIPOC producers and distributors like these grassroots leaders.

A strong, dynamic foundation for achieving these goals has been laid over the last decade. Values-based procurement can be a tool to transform our public supply chains: protecting workers’ human right to organize, building support for BIPOC producers, and increasing supplier transparency. Using the Good Food Purchasing Program as a strategic tool will require deepened institutional engagement, partnerships with workers and BIPOC producers, and resources for grassroots coalitions. The recommendations put forth in this report can help guide this transformative work while principles of accountability, transparency, enforcement, and racial equity must be guideposts for the road ahead.