The University of Virginia (UVA) is just one of many universities across the nation working toward a more sustainable future in dining. A large part of this movement involves local sourcing for dining services. Local sourcing not only supports the local economy and provides higher-quality produce, but it is also a crucial opportunity to engage students and faculty in conversations about the relationship between the food system and climate change (Urbanski). But while these benefits are recognized, the majority of campus food still comes from unsustainable sources like large food service companies that are entrenched in complex supply chains and contracts, making it difficult to change food sourcing practices (Urbanski). 

 

To learn more about UVA Dine’s past and current efforts to source local, Virginia grown and produced items in their dining locations in order to make these efforts more visible to students, check out this page as a resource for information about UVA's sustainable dining practices. On this website, you will find information about UVA’s partner organizations (4P Foods/Local Food Hub and Aramark), insight into the process of local sourcing for institutions like UVA with a focus on the barriers facing local BIPOC farmers, such as GAP certification, and an ongoing timeline of the farms that UVA Dine has sourced from since Fall of 2021 that links to a directory of these local farmers.

 

 

UVA’s Partners

 

In October of 2018, the UVA Sustainable Food Collaborative created a Sustainable Food Action Plan V1.0 that outlines five goals with details about the numerous actions and specific strategies required to achieve these goals. This resource focuses on the first of those goals: To Annually Increase the Percentage of Sustainable Food and Beverage ​Options Available on Grounds.

 

Local Food Hub 

 

Local Food Hub is a non-profit organization based in Central Virginia that provides services that help to grow the local food system, such as directly assisting growers in scaling up their businesses and creating programs to increase food access. They partner with UVA Sustainable Food Collaborative to help UVA Dine bring local vendors to UVA Farmer’s Market Days held at the Amphitheater. 

 

4P Foods 

 

4P Foods is a food products supplier that focuses on the distribution of locally-sourced food in three main areas of businesses: (1) delivering weekly groceries that come directly from farmers, (2) providing locally-farmed food to businesses, and (3) partnering with institutions to help integrate local food into school systems. They provide their services across Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

 

In May of 2019, 4P Foods acquired Local Food Hub’s warehouse in Charlottesville and merged their wholesale distribution operations. Local Food Hub continues to exist as a non-profit partner of Virginia farmers with 4P Foods taking responsibility for product sourcing, including packing and delivery. In 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, UVA Dine partnered with 4P Foods to create the Farmer’s Market in a Bag program which allowed students to order locally-sourced produce and locally-made snacks using their meal plan. UVA Dine continues to work with 4P Foods to source local ingredients that they serve at their dining locations (4P - About).

 

Aramark 

 

Roughly 70% of universities nationwide are contracted by one of the “big three” dining corporations: Aramark, Sodexo or Compass Group (AASHE). In 2014, UVA renewed its 20-year partnership with Aramark, a for-profit corporation that provides food service, facilities and uniform services to clients in the areas of education, healthcare, business, prisons, and leisure. Aramark designed and funded the Fresh Food Company at Newcomb Hall and the Pavilion XI (“The Pav”) (article). 

 

Some universities that are close to the end of these partnerships are actively re-imagining self-operated dining systems, which would be run entirely by the university. While this introduces challenges of efficiency and reliability, it would also provide more transparency in the food sourcing process for students and provide more opportunities for their input. 

 

Morven Kitchen Garden

 

Established in 2010, the Morven Kitchen Garden is a mission-driven farm that sells produce to UVA Dine and offers internship opportunities to UVA students. It was named UVA’s Sustainability Lab in 2022 and is located just 15 minutes from downtown Charlottesville. MKG also offers a Community Supported Agriculture program, where shareholders pay for 10 bags of fresh, local produce over the 10-week season. A discount is offered to UVA students, and the shares are picked up on-Grounds! 

 

Agricultural Markets

 

Agricultural markets are made up of supply chains, which comprise 7 sectors: (1) food production, (2) distribution and aggregation, (3) food processing, (4) marketing, (5) purchasing, (6) preparation and consumption, and (7) resource and waste recovery [Fig 1].  

 

Fig 1. Supply Chain Sectors (NC state)

 

The supply chain is a system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources that are involved in moving a product or service from supplier to consumer (krishi). More broadly, it transforms natural resources and raw materials into finished products that are eventually consumed by the end customer–at UVA Dine, the end customers are the UVA students that eat at UVA’s dining halls. 

 

[Commodity market vs local supply chain]

 

4P: produce farmer, no processing involved (ex. kale)

 

1. Farmer brings to 4P warehouse (multiple, cville has one) 
2. Delivered to dining locations at UVA from there 

 

• Include research about farm to fork (average miles/distance from UVA) 

 

SYSCO: there is a warehouse in Virginia (Harrisonburg) 

1. Get produce from some other distributor (many more steps, could be different for every item) 
2. Ex. grown in California, processed (chopped) somewhere else, then goes to distributor 
3. Ends up at warehouse
4. Delivered to dining locations 

 

• Not as transparent about which farms food is being sourced from 
• Fresh point program: partnering with local farms, getting them on SYSCO track 

 

Sysco is an example of a commodity supply chain. Sysco warehouses receive produce from other distributors: the produce could’ve been grown in a different state, then processed somewhere else, before being shipped to the distributor. At the warehouse, produce is selected and labeled to be delivered to UVA’s dining locations. This system is a lot less transparent for buyers, since they are usually unaware of who processes and ships the product. 

 

With a local supply chain like 4P Foods, and for non-processed foods, local produce farmers directly deliver their produce to 4P’s warehouses–they have locations in Charlottesville, ____. The produce is then brought directly to UVA’s dining locations. In this way, local supply chains tend to be much more transparent than large commodity chains. But it is important to note that some corporations have been recruiting local farms into their supply chain–Sysco does this through FreshPoint, their foodservice produce distributor. FreshPoint prioritizes food safety and transparency through providing customers with availability guides, weekly market reports, and local farmer bios. 

 

Price Differences

 

Mass-marketed, highly-processed commodity food is typically cheaper than local food because federal farmer subsidies typically go to the largest farms. This practice began in the Great Depression, since farm subsidies managed supply by paying farmers to reduce production during overproduction to help increase future prices (UVM). 

 

4P → “At 4P Foods, 60¢ of every dollar goes to the farmer vs. the conventional, which only pays out 14.5¢ of every dollar to farmers.”

 

Local Sourcing 

 

UVA and its partners define “local” as food that is grown or produced within 250 miles from Grounds (AASHE Report). With 4P Foods and other local distributors, such as Cavalier Produce and Produce Source Partners, UVA Dine is able to source local, Virginia grown or produced products in UVA’s dining locations. They also make efforts to engage students in their work to source more food locally through events like a “Farm to Fork Dinner”–which features a primarily local menu featuring products from a variety of Virginia producers sourced from local distributors–and a weekly “Sustainable Taste Cart” for students to sample local products (AASHE Report). 

 

Despite this movement towards local sourcing at universities, local farmers face several challenges such as GAP Food Safety Certification. 

 

GAP Food Safety Certification

 

UVA Dine requires sourcing from GAP-certified farms. In an effort to verify that fruits and vegetables are safely produced, packed, handled, and stored, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) implemented Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) audits, which are voluntary (USDA). Farmers can request these audits and become GAP-certified, which improves their opportunities to access the wholesale market (Carolina). 

 

Although UVA dine requires GAP certification, 4P Foods, our food distributor, doesn’t. 4P works with the Local Food Hub to provide technical and food safety assistance for independent farms, encouraging them to get GAP-certified (LFH). For example, Local Food Hub has created templates for the recordkeeping requirements of GAP certification–such as harvest and employee training logs. 

 

Since getting GAP-certified involves paying a GAP auditor to visit the farm, the process can be costly. GAP certification also requires built structures like covered waste impact areas–stations for washing and packing produce–which can be expensive to build. These factors generally make it difficult for local farmers to gain GAP certification and transition to selling wholesale, but local Black farmers are especially discouraged because of a history of distrust with the US government. The Pigford v. Glickman case in 1997, filed on behalf of groups of African-American farmers, asserted that the USDA had “systematically discriminated against African-American farmers on the basis of race” (Black Farmer Case). This case, in conjunction with the Brewington v. Glickman case in 1998–another lawsuit filed on the behalf of African-American farmers–, became one of the largest civil rights settlements in history, second only to Keepseagle v. Vilsack, a case which Native American farmers brought against the USDA after the Pigford settlement (Brandeis). 

 

But many believe that the settlement did not address the years of discrimination against Black farmers in the form of unfair treatment by their local USDA county committees, such as waiting longer for farm loans or assistance than white farmers, or being denied those loans altogether. As a result, between 1920 and 1999, 98.1% percent of Black farmers left their profession (Brandeis). Efforts to integrate local Black farmers into the wholesale market should reference this history. 

 

Timeline 

 

 

UVA Local Farmer Directory

 

• Disclaimer that these are farms that have worked with UVA at some point → not necessarily currently working with UVA