Sustainable school food procurement: What factors do affect the introduction and the increase of organic food?

Public School Food Procurements (PSFPs) are recognized as drivers of food and nutrition security. In the last decade, researchers and institutions have focused on designing sustainable school food procurements that include organic food. This study examines the public food procurement system in 524 of the 1554 municipalities of Lombardy in Northern Italy. A Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model is used to explore the factors affecting the initial adoption and the increase of organic food in PSFP at the regional level. Four sets of factors are investigated, including territorial indicators, market constraints, PSFP's management and governance and concern for local and certified origin products. The results show that the initial introduction of organic food correlates with higher population density and bigger farms in the area and strongly depends on pressure from municipal administrations and canteen committee for environmental sustainability and youth health. However, the introduction of organic food often must be driven by the initiative of catering service management and must take into account municipal policies to support the local production and certified origin products. Conversely, the adoption intensity increases when PSFP is managed by private companies and stakeholder pressure is strong, although the adoption intensity can be adversely affected by higher perceived costs of organic products when compared to conventional products. This analysis thus confirms the importance of the participation of local stakeholders in designing more sustainable PSFP. The analysis also provides local stakeholders with a systematic dataset at the regional scale regarding the factors that drive sustainable choices in PSFP. The analysis thus supports institutions and policy-makers in coordinating the alignment between food demand and supply in order to better address the sustainability.