Collaborating for More Local Foods

School districts throughout Massachusetts have long understood that there can be benefits to working together to purchase goods and provide student services. Collaboration can bring efficiencies and help communicate aggregated demand for products that can help drive availability of these products in the market. In recent years, many schools have begun to explore whether this kind of collaboration can also help them purchase more local foods for their school meal programs. A new initiative Mass. Farm to School is supporting hopes to do just that with locally caught seafood.

Mass. Farm to School has been working with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) to release a Request for Proposals (RFP) for seafood on behalf of districts throughout eastern and central Massachusetts. MAPC has a long history of fostering municipal collaboration on purchasing, but it was only recently that they began exploring helping municipalities purchase food for schools.

Mass. Farm to School and MAPC identified seafood as a great local product to focus on for a number of reasons:

• A significant amount of locally caught, underutilized species are available at competitive prices, but many seafood vendors do not know that schools are a potential market. The RFP provides a way to demonstrate this demand to vendors.
• Seafood is available year-round, making it a great tool for increasing overall local foods usage.
• As a higher value item, schools can benefit from doing a formal solicitation for seafood to ensure compliance with all local, state, and federal procurement regulations. MAPC takes care of all the RFP and contract administration, leaving schools more time to focus on serving kids good food.
• The Commonwealth has a new seafood marketing program that is looking to raise the profile of this great local resource – the program has provided financial support for our seafood Harvest of the Month and a series of seafood culinary trainings as well as supporting this collective procurement effort.

We look forward seeing how this first collaborative purchasing effort can increase access to healthy, locally caught seafood for thousands of Massachusetts students.

The seafood RFP was issued in early February and vendors have until March 14th to submit their proposals. Contracts will likely be awarded in late March. To view the full RFP, with information on how to respond as a vendor or to check if your school district will be able to use the contract, click here.