South Dakota State University
OP-6: Food and Beverage Purchasing

See above.

Our dining services contractor, Aramark, does not have a sustainable food and beverage purchasing program. However, they do have several efforts to buy sustainably produced products as described below. Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program is used by Aramark to ensure sustainably sourced seafood. Aramark does not buy any animal products where the animal is force fed. Aramark purchases cage-free shell eggs. Aramark suppliers must follow the "five freedoms" of animal welfare developed by Farm Animal Welfare Committee of the United Kingdom.

An excel spreadsheet was made of all the STARS’ 3rd party verifiers and the companies they have listed. Each product provided by an SDSU vendor was looked up on this list by supplier name. If the supplier was on the list, the products and location of supplier also had to match in order for the product to be considered 3rd party verified. If they did not match, the product was not counted in the final list. If no product or location was provided on the 3rd party verified list, the supplier was counted in the list. If there were several options for 3rd party verifiers for a supplier and 1 gave a state which didn’t match the state given by SDSU and the other had no state, the verifier with no state was used. To see if a product was locally based, the supplier’s location city was used. If the city fell into a 250 mile radius (https://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm), the company was looked up to specifically to see if the website mentioned where the food was grown, assuming that the location given for the company was the manufacturing or distribution plant. If it was grown within the 250 mile radius then the supplier was considered local and community-based. If the product was not grown within 250 miles or the website did not mention where they products were grown, it was assumed it was outside the 250 radius and the supplier was not considered local and community-based. It was very difficult to find out which local companies were community-based. For each local company, their website was searched to see if any information that would help decide if it was community-based according to the definition on page 144 in the STARS Technical Manual. If no information was found or the information fell into the definition of community-based it was included in the report.

Our on-campus dining, catering, franchises, convenience stores, and vending services were all included in one inventory. The inventory used is not a complete list of all products bought by dining services. We included all the information we were able to gather (only 1/4-1/2 of Aramark purchases were included due to being unable to gather inventory lists from some providers).