New York City is the second-largest institutional food purchaser in the nation, behind only the U.S. Department of Defense. Every year, eleven City agencies spend over $500 million buying food for institutions including public schools, hospitals, senior centers, homeless shelters, and detention facilities, serving approximately 219 million meals and snacks.
Where that half-billion dollars goes determines which farms survive, which communities build wealth, and whether the City’s food operation advances public health, environmental sustainability, and economic equity, or simply moves calories at the lowest possible cost. The City has tried to push its purchasing toward those goals. It has enacted local laws to increase New York State sourcing, issued executive orders on values-aligned procurement, enrolled in a national good food framework, and adopted some of the strictest nutrition standards of any major American city. Despite all of that, the vast majority of food contracts still flow to a handful of large national and regional distributors. Smaller producers, local farms, and minority- and women-owned businesses have been largely shut out. Understanding why starts with how the system works.
How NYC Buys Half a Billion Dollars in Food Annually
New York City’s food purchasing system involves multiple agencies, overlapping authorities, and a vocabulary all its own. ‘Procurement’ is the government term for purchasing: the process by which City agencies solicit bids, select vendors, and sign contracts for the goods and services they need. For food, procurement is split across multiple agencies with different roles.
While eleven City agencies procure significant amounts of food, spending is heavily concentrated. The Department of Education accounts for roughly $200–250 million in annual food procurement and serves approximately 900,000 meals and snacks daily. The Department for the Aging spends about $50 million annually and the Department of Correction about $17 million. The remaining spending is spread across agencies including NYC Health + Hospitals, the Human Resources Administration, the Department of Homeless Services, and the Administration for Children’s Services.
Most of these agencies don’t handle their own food purchasing. Instead, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) acts as a central purchasing agent, buying food on their behalf. Through its Office of Citywide Procurement, DCAS manages roughly 1,000 “requirement contracts,” standing agreements with vendors that lock in prices and terms for set periods, typically one to three years. These contracts function like pre-negotiated accounts: once DCAS has established the terms with a vendor, individual agencies can place orders under that contract without having to run their own bidding process each time.
The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS), which works in consultation with the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, oversees the rules and infrastructure of the procurement process itself. Rather than buying food directly, MOCS runs PASSPort, the City’s online portal where vendors register, find open solicitations, and submit bids. If DCAS is the buyer, MOCS is the regulator making sure the buying follows the rules. While most direct food purchases, like cases of chicken or pallets of produce, flow through DCAS’s requirement contracts, when an agency needs a company to not just supply food but actually prepare and serve meals, that agency typically handles the contract itself. This is why the system can be hard to follow: purchasing authority is split depending on what’s being bought and how.
And for any vendor hoping to sell food to the City, the path in runs through a gauntlet of administrative requirements: registration with both the Payee Information Portal and PASSPort, extensive disclosure filings, demonstrated organizational capacity to fulfill large-volume contracts, and, for food service contracts involving human services, Health and Human Services Prequalification. But who can compete for these contracts is not just a matter of administrative capacity. It is shaped by a legal framework the City did not write and cannot easily change.
The State Law That Limits What the City Can Buy
Under New York State’s General Municipal Law §103, municipalities have historically been required to award contracts to the “lowest responsible bidder.” In practice, that means the vendor who meets the basic qualifications and offers the cheapest price wins. A 2012 amendment allowed agencies to consider ‘best value’ instead, meaning they can weigh quality and efficiency alongside cost rather than defaulting to the lowest price. But the law defines those terms narrowly. Local sourcing, environmental impact, fair labor practices, and public health are not among the criteria agencies can legally use to justify choosing one bid over another. Courts and state guidance have interpreted this law as preempting local law, meaning NYC cannot simply pass its own legislation to override the state framework.
The state has created some incentives to encourage local purchasing. The 30% NYS Initiative, for example, increases school meal reimbursements from 5.9 cents to 25 cents per meal for districts that source at least 30 percent of their lunch costs from New York producers. But incentives don’t change the underlying legal framework, which still treats price as the deciding factor.
That leaves even well-intentioned City agencies with little room to maneuver. For contracts over $100,000, food procurement is built around sealed bidding, and staff face real legal risk for choosing anyone other than the cheapest qualifying bidder. Even when agencies want to prioritize values beyond price, those values are difficult to write into enforceable contract terms and harder still to verify at scale. Below that threshold, agencies have more flexibility, but the vast majority of the City’s food dollars flow through large contracts well above it.
The most ambitious attempt at structural change came in 2024, when the New York State legislature passed the Good Food NY bill. The legislation would have allowed municipalities to prioritize local sourcing, sustainability, worker rights, and nutrition in awarding contracts, even if a bid came in up to ten percent higher than the cheapest option. Governor Hochul vetoed it, leaving the “lowest responsible bidder” framework intact and the City without clear authority to pay even modest premiums for values-aligned vendors. The bill is returning to the legislature this session. Its fate will go a long way toward determining whether New York City’s food procurement system can meaningfully evolve.
What the City Has Done Within Those Constraints
Unable to change the underlying law, the City has pursued other strategies to push its food purchasing in a more values-aligned direction, though the needle has been slow to move.
Since 2011, Local Law 50 has given City agencies several tools to increase purchasing from New York State (NYS) producers. The most straightforward is a product mandate: an agency can specify that a particular item, say apples, must come from New York State. That limits the bidding pool to vendors who can supply NYS apples, and the lowest bidder among them wins. The City doesn’t pay a premium for choosing local; it simply defines what it’s buying as a local product. Separately, agencies can apply a price preference, choosing a NYS vendor even if their bid is up to 10 percent higher than a non-local competitor. And under the 2012 “best value” amendment to state procurement law, agencies can also weigh whether food is grown, processed, or distributed by an in-state vendor when evaluating bids. These guidelines extend to contracted providers that run meal programs, including senior centers and homeless shelters, not just to direct food purchases by City agencies.
The City went further in 2017, enrolling in the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), a national framework adopted by cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. The GFPP is designed to help public institutions leverage their food purchasing power to promote a more sustainable and equitable food system. It uses a metrics-based framework to evaluate and score institutional procurement across five categories: nutrition, local economies, environmental sustainability, a valued workforce, and animal welfare, creating comparable, transparent scorecards that allow outside evaluation and hold cities accountable over time. By 2019, the City had expanded its commitment to all municipal agencies that procure food, and the Center for Good Food Purchasing had begun baseline assessments for the Department of Education and NYC Health + Hospitals. The Center handled reporting for the City until 2023, when the contract was discontinued.
The Adams administration then took the process in-house. In 2022, Mayor Adams issued Executive Order 8, creating a citywide ‘good food’ purchasing reporting system. The framework uses similar value categories as the GFPP but with metrics and accountability tools the City controls, rather than submitting to the program’s independent scoring. Vendors are required to share data on the food and meals they supply to the City, including where that food comes from, and the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy publishes the results annually through a public dashboard covering all participating agencies going back to fiscal year 2019. The City has made real strides toward transparency, but the framework lacks the independent oversight that has driven concrete purchasing shifts in cities that fully committed to the GFPP.
The City has also leveraged one area the procurement system can’t constrain: defining what it buys, rather than who it buys from. Procurement law prevents agencies from choosing vendors based on values like sustainability or local sourcing, but it does allow them to set detailed product specifications. If the City says it wants low-sugar yogurt instead of just yogurt, every vendor has to meet that standard to compete. The specifications don’t change who wins the contract, but they change what ends up on the tray. The City’s Food Standards, first launched in 2008 and updated most recently in August 2025 with new rules taking effect July 1, 2026, are the most significant use of this approach. Under the latest update, processed meats are being eliminated entirely, requirements for whole or minimally processed plant-based proteins are being increased, restrictions on low- and no-calorie sweeteners are being expanded from children to all ages, artificial colors and certain preservatives are now restricted, and snack requirements are being strengthened to improve variety and nutritional quality.
However, some of these efforts could be complicated by recent shifts in federal dietary policy. The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines, released in January 2026, raise recommended protein intakes, give new prominence to red meat and full-fat dairy, and de-emphasize plant-based proteins. NYC can set stricter nutrition standards for its own institutions, but federally funded programs like the National School Lunch Program must follow USDA rules, which by law reflect the Dietary Guidelines. If upcoming updates to school meal rules narrow what counts as an acceptable protein source, they could directly conflict with the City’s plant-forward approach.
But whether any of this is actually changing who gets the City’s food dollars requires looking at the data.
Who Gets the Contracts, and Who Doesn’t
So far, not much has changed. The City’s food dollars continue to flow overwhelmingly to the same places. A small number of large distributors and food service companies capture the vast majority of contracts. These companies have the infrastructure, supply chain networks, and administrative capacity to navigate the City’s complex procurement system. Local laws, executive orders, and nutrition standards may shape what ends up on the tray, but the contracts themselves keep going to the same vendors.
One of the clearest measures of who benefits from public food spending is how much reaches minority- and women-owned businesses, a metric the City tracks as part of its good food purchasing framework under the local economies category. A 2022 Comptroller’s report found that just 5.2 percent of the value of all new City contracts went to certified minority- and women-owned business enterprises (M/WBEs), with Black-owned vendors receiving under 2 percent and Latino-owned firms faring similarly. Food is no exception. According to the City’s Good Food Purchasing (GFP) dashboard, NYS M/WBE vendors received just 3.83 percent of the roughly $1.15 billion in food spending the City analyzed between fiscal years 2019 and 2023. Women-owned businesses accounted for 0.11 percent.
The local sourcing numbers are more encouraging, but they rest on incomplete data. The GFP dashboard, which tracks item-level purchasing data reported by vendors under Executive Order 8, shows the share of City food dollars going to New York State producers climbed from $76 million in fiscal year 2019 to $193 million in 2023, reaching about 53 percent of analyzed food spending. But vendor participation in reporting has been inconsistent, the data that does come back is often incomplete, particularly for prepared foods with complex supply chains where tracing ingredients to their origin is difficult, and roughly a third of the City’s total food spending over that period has not been analyzed at all.
The Local Law 50 reports, a separate data collection effort run by MOCS that focuses specifically on New York State sourcing, have similar gaps. The reports require vendors to disclose where their food comes from, but the surveys are voluntary, and most vendors don’t respond. In fiscal year 2025, MOCS surveyed vendors across contracts worth a combined $1.26 billion. Only 36 responded, covering roughly $16 million in total food spending. The vendors who do respond tend to be small nonprofits contracted to serve meals, not the large distributors who move the bulk of the City’s food. The fiscal year 2023 report acknowledged the problem, noting that providers “do not typically track this data on an ongoing basis.” The result is a set of sourcing numbers built on a sliver of actual spending, with no reliable way to measure whether the City’s purchasing is actually shifting.
The problem isn’t a lack of willing suppliers. It’s a system built with structural barriers at every step. The procurement paperwork alone, including registration portals, disclosure forms, and prequalification applications, can be overwhelming for businesses without dedicated compliance staff. The liability insurance required to sell food to schools can be prohibitively expensive for small and mid-sized operations. And Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification, a food safety credential that many institutional buyers expect, demands additional time and resources that strain limited budgets.
Even businesses that clear those administrative hurdles face a more fundamental problem: price. Farms paying living wages, using sustainable practices, or operating without the economies of scale that industrial suppliers enjoy will never win a contest judged primarily on cost. In a procurement system built around the lowest bid, that difference is not a gap producers can close through effort or efficiency. It is a structural feature of how the system decides who wins.
Scale compounds the problem. Many small and mid-sized farms produce too much for direct-to-consumer channels like farmers markets but not enough to fulfill the volume requirements that institutional contracts demand.
Farms that can grow at sufficient volume face logistical hurdles on two fronts. Getting food from upstate farms to City facilities is complex and expensive, and most small and mid-sized operations don’t have the delivery infrastructure to move products at the frequency institutions require. Then there’s the question of form: schools need products pre-cut, frozen, or otherwise processed for kitchens that often lack the equipment or labor to handle whole ingredients. Most small and mid-sized farms can’t deliver food that way, and there aren’t enough regional processing facilities to do it for them. The Bronx has been identified as a strategic location for a food hub that could aggregate and process products from upstate farms, but that infrastructure doesn’t yet exist at the needed scale.
There’s also a gatekeeping problem no individual farm can solve. Most schools buy through a primary distributor, typically a large national food service company, and if that distributor doesn’t carry products from small and mid-sized regional producers, those producers are shut out entirely. Schools have identified having more New York foods offered by their main vendor as one of the biggest factors for increasing local purchasing, and no single producer can change that on their own.
The Office Building a Way In for Small and Local Producers
These are the barriers the Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture (MOUA) is trying to break down. Rather than waiting for state procurement reform, the office has been building practical pathways for small and mid-sized producers to access the City’s institutional food market, while organizing the broader community of stakeholders who want the system to change.
A central piece of that work is NYC School Food EATS (Enhancing Accessibility, Training, & Support), the City’s first farmer procurement training program, run by MOUA in collaboration with Cornell Harvest NY and funded by a New York State Farm-to-School grant. EATS targets small and mid-scale local and regional growers, producers, and food hub operators who have historically been locked out of the City’s institutional food markets. The training covers the ground these businesses need to compete: how municipal bidding works, how to prepare a product submission packet for the DOE, how to obtain certifications like M/WBE and Good Agricultural Practices, and how to assess whether their production capacity fits what school buyers actually need.
Nine farm and food hub businesses completed the inaugural cohort. Among them, Finca Seremos, a food justice-centered farm in the Hudson Valley, used the program to begin pursuing GAP certification and connect with the Department of Small Business Services. The Catskills Agrarian Alliance, which had already piloted a processing project that turned 18,000 pounds of regional tomatoes into sauce for 11 school districts, used the training to explore expanding into New York City schools. Brooklyn Packers, a Black and brown worker-owned cooperative that distributes food from local BIPOC producers, used it to identify new farm partnerships and distribution channels.
Full DOE contracts remain out of reach for most of these producers because the volume requirements are simply too large, so MOUA has created seasonal micro-purchasing opportunities as an alternative entry point, sourcing fresh, culturally relevant produce from cohort farms for events at public schools, Gracie Mansion, and community produce giveaways in Harlem. The office is now working to scale up the program and open additional pathways, including expanded technical assistance and stronger connections between producers, food hubs, and school food buyers.
What Producers Are Saying and MOUA Is Proposing
MOUA has also been convening the people most affected by the procurement system to help reshape it. Purchasing with Purpose, the office’s community series, brings together policy experts, farmers, food businesses, and advocates to surface barriers and collectively develop proposals for what equitable procurement could look like. The producers and small business owners navigating the administrative and financial hurdles outlined above have been showing up to share their experiences firsthand.
At one of these sessions, Vic Lee of Welcome to Chinatown, a nonprofit focused on small business and entrepreneurship in Manhattan’s Chinatown, said the administrative burden of navigating the procurement system falls especially hard on immigrant-owned businesses and early-stage entrepreneurs: “They’re often bootstrapping things, they don’t have all of those resources to navigate regulations.”
And the producers who do manage to clear those hurdles run straight into the cost wall. Karna Ray of Brooklyn Packers said that even after meeting every requirement the system demands, price alone keeps them out: “We can get all of our certs in place, we can be as good as we need to be, we can have everything in place, but at the end of the day, we can’t compete on price. Our potatoes will just be more expensive. So unless there’s strong policy around values-aligned procurement, kind of none of the rest of it matters.” Kim Vallejo, business director of She Wolf Bakery, a Brooklyn bakery that uses local organic grains and pays above-industry wages, put it another way: “It is not cheap to make bread the way that we make it. A lot of folks are used to commodity flour that is being turned into bread by some of the lowest paid, I think forgotten about, employees within the food system. Baker’s pay tends to be very low. And that’s how you get cheap bread.”
For Lee, the answer isn’t just simplifying the process but rethinking what it values altogether: “Procurement really should not optimize for the lowest bid. We also have to think about how we factor in cultural significance, quality, local ownership, and the size of the businesses.”
Through these sessions, MOUA has heard from many other producers, food businesses, and advocates, as well as national organizations like the Center for Good Food Purchasing and the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, which brought lessons from cities wrestling with the same problems. Drawing on those conversations, the office has started developing a set of policy recommendations and recently released a policy brief to bring greater transparency and information to the community on this issue.
On procurement, the office calls for expanding micro- and small-purchasing contracts scaled to what local farmers and cooperatives can actually fulfill. In practice, this could mean creating smaller contract tiers that would let a Hudson Valley vegetable farm or a Brooklyn-based food cooperative compete for a piece of the City’s spending without having to supply every school in the Bronx. It could also mean building on existing infrastructure investments, like the GrowNYC Regional Food Hub in Hunts Point, by developing additional aggregation points where small producers can pool their products to collectively meet volume requirements that none of them could fill alone. Some of these changes could be pursued through local legislation, for instance a bill requiring agencies to set aside a percentage of food purchasing for small or micro-contracts.
The office also calls for improving the visibility of vendor opportunities and certification processes, since many small and minority-owned businesses don’t know these contracts exist or how to access them. Visibility runs both directions: there’s also a need for better infrastructure connecting buyers to local producers. A centralized database of local and regional farmers and producers, for example, would make it easier for agencies, institutions, and food service operators looking to source locally to find vendors without having to cold-call individual farms.
On institutional coordination, MOUA is pushing for new interagency collaborations, particularly with the Offices of Economic Opportunity and Civic Engagement, to better align City food and agriculture policy with the new administration’s priorities of affordability and economic justice. Food purchasing currently operates in its own silo: DCAS buys the food, individual agencies serve it, and the City’s economic development and equity offices have little involvement in deciding who gets those contracts. The office argues that if the City is serious about directing public dollars to underserved communities, the agencies responsible for that goal need a seat at the procurement table.
And on transparency, MOUA argues for better data collection and public reporting, especially around small and micro-contracts, the category where local producers are most likely to compete and where the City currently has the least visibility into where its money is going. The City tracks spending on large requirement contracts in some detail, but smaller purchases often fall below the reporting threshold, making it difficult to know whether local sourcing initiatives are actually reaching local businesses.
For MOUA, the question isn’t just how the City buys food but what that spending says about its priorities. As Executive Director Qiana Mickie put it, “When we decide to value food sovereignty, sustainability, and economic opportunity in City food procurement policy, we are valuing communities across the city and putting New Yorkers first. Until factors like local ownership, cultural significance, and fair labor actually count in purchasing decisions, the system will continue to exclude the very producers and communities it claims to serve.”
New Bill, Same Barriers
The reforms that MOUA and stakeholders have called for are structural: changes to how contracts are sized, how vendors access the system, and what infrastructure exists to support them. The City Council has recently entered the conversation, but with a focus on increased oversight and accountability rather than structural reform.
Earlier this month, Council Members Amanda Farías, Julie Won, and Gale Brewer introduced Introduction 0533, a local law to create a good food purchasing program and advisory board. The bill would codify values-based procurement into the City’s administrative code, giving it the durability of local law rather than relying on Executive Order 8, which any future mayor could revoke. It would also establish a 14-plus member advisory board, with members appointed by the Mayor and Speaker, to conduct baseline assessments, develop benchmarking plans, and evaluate and score food procurement bids against five value categories: environmental sustainability, local economies, health, valued workforce, and animal welfare. Codification is something advocates have long called for, and the bill is well-intentioned. But it does little to address the structural barriers that actually prevent small and local producers from competing.
The bill’s biggest departure from the current framework is its scoring mechanism. Right now, good food purchasing reporting is retrospective: the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy tracks how agency spending aligns with values after contracts are already in place. This bill would move evaluation upstream, with the board scoring bids before agencies make decisions and posting those scores publicly. But the mechanism is largely toothless: agencies “may consider” the board’s assessments, with no requirement to act on them.
The scoring also only kicks in for contracts above $100,000, the bids already dominated by major distributors. For smaller purchases, where agencies have more flexibility and where small and local producers are most likely to compete, the bill offers nothing new. In practice, the scoring system will mostly evaluate big companies competing against each other, giving them a new framework to differentiate themselves on values metrics. A company with a compliance team can package its supply chain data to score well. That doesn’t mean its practices are meaningfully better; it means it has the resources to perform well in a formal evaluation process.
The board’s composition raises similar concerns. While the bill includes seats for individuals “representing local farm owners” and “representing local farm workers,” these are political appointees, not people drawn from the communities doing this work on the ground. The bill does offer more specific value category definitions than Executive Order 8, with criteria around collective bargaining, fair compensation, synthetic pesticides, and greenhouse gas emissions. But better definitions on paper mean little in a procurement system that still isn’t structured to accommodate the vendors who actually meet them.
All of this matters because half a billion dollars a year in public food spending shapes public health, local economies, and who gets to participate in one of the largest food systems in the country. The Good Food NY bill, if it passes in Albany, would give the City significant new authority. But the City doesn’t need to wait. It already has the tools to pursue many of the changes producers have called for. And as the Council begins legislating in this space, the bills it passes should reflect what small and local producers have actually been saying they need to compete, not just add new ways to measure a system that was never built to include them.
