Washington University in St. Louis
OP-7: Food and Beverage Purchasing

Washington University's Strategic Plan for Sustainable Operations sets a series of goals for 8 key areas including food. For food, the goals include sourcing at least 22% local food by 2020 (by dollar spent) and 25% environmentally preferable, humane and fair food by 2020 (by dollar spent). These goals provide a framework for the University dining services to conduct sustainable food and beverage purchasing programs: Bon Appetit (represents 86% of our dining providers in 2017) runs a number of sustainability-related dining programs, initiatives, and events including but not limited to: Farm to Fork Program, Low Carbon Diet Day, Eat Local Challenge, Sustainable Seafood Purchasing, Cash for Crops Program, purchasing grass-fed beef, and using certified cage-free, humanely raised shell eggs. Aramark (represents 10% of our dining providers in 2017) is also committed to buying only cage-free eggs and most of their seafood is certified Monterey Bay or Marine Stewardship Council. Catering St. Louis (2%) and Kaldi's (2%) manage a few small cafes/restaurants across campus that are particularly committed to sustainable practices, especially local sourcing and food waste reduction (Farmstead, Shell Cafe, etc.). All of the University's dining services are sourcing the large majority of their coffees and teas from Kaldi's coffee. The local roaster runs several sustainability-related programs, including the "Relationship Coffees" that ensures that the coffee production exceeds fair trade practices (https://kaldiscoffee.com/pages/kaldis-relationship-coffee).

In the fall of 2017, the Office of Sustainability conducted a Progress Report to measure the University's progresses since the implementation of its Strategic Plan for Sustainable Operations in 2015. As part of the report, all 4 dining providers provided their food and beverage purchasing inventory for the fiscal year 2017 (July 1st - June 30), detailing the amounts of local foods and environmentally preferable, humane and fair foods. The data collected for this progress report has been compiled into the AASHE STARS Food and Beverage inventory template. Some products have been reported as sustainable by our dining providers but we have judged the level of information provided was too low to be included in the attached inventory. Aside from the progress report, the University has the goal of improving transparency and accountability in the university food system, with a review of the sustainability metrics quarterly.

A large amount of the University's dining providers food and beverage purchase comes from local vendors and restaurants. They don't qualify as community-based as they are often importing a significant amount of their products from beyond the 250 mile radius limit. However, these businesses are still locally based.

Washington University contracts out its dining services to 4 different vendors: Bon Appetit, Aramark, Catering St. Louis and Kaldi's. The local and community-based and/or third party verified food percentage is the combination of all 4 vendors expenditures (food and beverage expenditures that are local and community-based and/or third party verified / total food and beverage expenditures). This data represents spending from fiscal year 2017 (July 2016-June 2017).