The Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance is continuing our work on local food procurement in Ontario’s long-term care sector with the project Serving Up Local II.
The Serving Up Local Economic Analysis (SULEA) project is the second phase of GHFFA’s incredibly successful Serving Up Local Project (SUL), where the project team worked with nine long-term care (LTC) homes in the Golden Horseshoe area on a food purchasing project with a local food target of 5% increase from their baseline. Local food was defined as grown, raised and processed in Ontario. After 18 months on the project, and despite the initial perceived barriers to purchasing local food, the Cohort 1 LTC teams surpassed their 5% goal with a combined average increase of 21% local food purchases.
For Serving Up Local II, the Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance partnered with the University of Guelph, to better understand the initial Cohort’s purchasing decisions and associated effects of increased local food purchasing. The research focused on examining an unprecedented set of food purchasing reports – from the nine long-term care (LTC) homes in Cohort 1, and five additional LTC homes in Cohort 2.
The project’s goal is to explore positive food purchasing outcomes of setting a local food priority, to implement food purchase tracking practices in LTC homes, and provide evidence to actualize Ontario’s Local Food Act for the Broader Public Sector with a focus in long-term care.
The final report for Serving Up Local II will be available in January 2022.
For more information on the project, please contact:
Sara Epp, Principal Researcher – University of Guelph sepp@uoguelph.ca
Project Managers Soni Craik Christie s.craikchristie@gmail.com or Stephanie Crocker stephaniejcrocker@gmail.com.