Dynamic Food Procurement: a digital experiment in Gloucestershire schools (England)

Keech, Daniel ORCID: 0000-0003-4112-9030, Maye, Damian ORCID: 0000-0002-4459-6630 and Reed, Matt ORCID: 0000-0003-1105-9625 (2024) Dynamic Food Procurement: a digital experiment in Gloucestershire schools (England). Food and Foodways, 33 (2). (In Press)

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Abstract

Localising school food procurement has been the subject of international scholarship for several decades, including in the UK, where examples of isolated good practice have emerged. The benefits of local school food are based on three key potentials - sustainable food system transformation, the special market agency of public authorities, the cultural benefits of localising school meals. A new technological innovation called Dynamic Food Procurement (DFP) has recently enabled the efficient bundling of produce supply from local producers towards school catering buyers. Using a Living Lab methodology in the English county of Gloucestershire, this article describes an experiment to apply DFP technology to the challenge of optimising local procurement for a school meals service feeding over 18,000 pupils daily. While the Living Lab created an iterative, transparent and inclusive structure to plan the introduction of DFP, the experiment faced entrenched commercial practices, policy inconsistency and legal complexities to reveal the limited leverage of the Living Lab at a large territorial scale. The main contribution of the article is to complement somewhat enthusiastic indications of the potentials of purchasing power of public food with finer-grained practical experiences now being called for in the literature.

Item Type:	Article
Article Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Dynamic food procurement; School food; Regional supply chains; Gloucestershire; Living labs; Governance innovation
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General) > S560 Farm Economics T Technology > T Technology (General)
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > Countryside and Community Research Institute
Depositing User:	Caitlin Mackenzie
Date Deposited:	06 Jan 2025 09:59
Last Modified:	06 Jan 2025 09:59
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/14629

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