George Brown College
OP-6: Food and Beverage Purchasing

The Compass Group is the College's food service manager and operates all College-run cafeterias. It aims to act responsibly and professionally in all its commercial activities and in its relationships with its suppliers and customers. We have established standards to ensure the availability of healthy and/or sustainable choices and assurance of supply. We seek to ensure that best practice incorporate responsibility principles, statements and metrics are incorporated in our business policies. We pay particular attention to ethical and sustainable sourcing, environmental impact and performance, and our relationships with our suppliers and customers. Compass Group is committed to ensuring that all of our dealings with suppliers, from the point of search and selection to supply and payment, are conducted in accordance with the guiding principles of responsible and ethical trading. We will work with our suppliers and customers to understand and meet the needs of consumers in each local marketplace. Where demand exists this includes sourcing of Fair Trade products and, in particular, Fair Trade tea, coffee and chocolate. In addition to supporting Fair Trade, we will encourage our main tea and coffee suppliers to work in partnership with growers, offering appropriate technical advice, training and assistance to relevant research projects designed to improve the quality, efficiency and productivity of their farms. This is also a sustainable way of improving the incomes and standard of living of the farmers in the long term In order to protect the supply chain and provide complete traceability, we have put together a program that facilitates the purchase of local produce through our produce distribution chain. The produce house certifies the grower which protects our customers. This not only allows the supplier to sell to our organization, but they then have access to the entire customer base for the produce house–clearly a win for us and a win for the local farmer, not to mention its positive impact on the carbon footprint of the food we serve.

Using year-long purchasing records, the food contractor filtered these records based on the STARS criteria for local/and community based and/or third party verified to be ecologically sound, fair and/or humane. The expenditures on food products that met this criteria were subsequently summed to produce the value of total expenditures on sustainable and local food purchase