Since Summer 2020, KK&P has been supporting the adoption and implementation of the Good Food Purchasing (GFP) Program by the City of New York, with participation by seven city agencies who, in aggregate, purchase over $300 million worth of food each year. KK&P has been helping NYC to advance this framework by providing technical assistance and action planning guidance to these agencies, while also collaborating with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and the Center for Good Food Purchasing in facilitating the development of citywide strategies.
The GFP framework, created by the Center for Good Food Purchasing, provides a metrics-based approach for assessing institutional procurement across five value categories: local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition. For example, local economies purchasing is measured by the dollar spend on food products sourced from non-corporately owned farms within 250 miles. A number of institutions and municipalities across the U.S. have adopted the GFP program, but NYC is the first city to adopt the program at this scale and across all major food-purchasing city agencies.
In another first, NYC has committed to unprecedented transparency in its ongoing GFP work. This September, the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy released its first major set of data and documents, including the action plans that KK&P helped to develop, as well as agency-level GFP assessments. These documents, and more information about the GFP framework, can be found here.
KK&P’s work with GFP continues our long history of guiding values-driven procurement by institutions and corporations. To learn more about this history, see this interview, also in this month’s newsletter.