Wesleyan University
OP-7: Food and Beverage Purchasing

Bon Appétit Management Company, Wesleyan's dining service, has a corporate commitment to sustainability that is evident at Wesleyan. All meals on campus are cooked from scratch. Bon Appétit's Farm to Fork program is a company-wide initiative that requires each of Bon Appétit’s 500 cafés across the country to purchase at least 20% of their ingredients from small, local, owner-operated vendors and farmers within a 150-mile radius of campus. Wesleyan purchases 22% of foods locally through its Farm to Fork program; another 2% of food and beverage purchases are sustainably sourced. All coffee is organic, fair trade, and kosher; all shell eggs are cage free and American Humane Certified; all poultry is antibiotic and hormone free; all seafood meets Monterey Bay Seafood Watch's "Best Choices" standards; all milk is RBST-free and purchased from Ronnybrook Farm, a local dairy; and the vegan program serves entirely organic produce, dry herbs, and rice. In 2012, following the lead of students, President Michael Roth signed the Real Food Campus Commitment. This nationwide commitment pledges colleges and universities to buy 20% real food, defined as "local/community-based, fair, ecologically sound, and/or humane" by 2020. The commitment aims to get colleges and universities to use their purchasing power to support a healthy food system that strengthens local economies, respects human rights, ensures ecological sustainability, and facilitates community involvement and education.

Bon Appetit tracks this data through its Farm to Fork Program. Students, working in conjunction with Bon Appetit, use the Real Food Calculator to track and inventory sustainable food purchases from Usdan Marketplace (largest dining hall). The RFC does not include locally-procured meat without certification (all of Wesleyan's ground beef is from NE family farms, but this does not apply to RFC). For Usdan alone, RFC found that 15% of Wesleyan's food purchases were "real food."

Ground beef is purchased through Northeast Family Farms, which is not recognized by RFC (beef comes from 3 family farms meeting RFC criteria, but because NEFF doesn't register which farm individual beef products come from, it is counted toward our total number but not our real food number).

Data above is from Bon Appetit's FY15 (October 2014-September 2015). Real Food data and meat data is extrapolated from a two-month period in Spring 2015. Naked Juice contains fair trade bananas. Tomatoes are purchased through the Fair Food program. The following animal product purchases are classified as sustainable: Poultry: 6.1% Meat: 39.4% Seafood: 31.3% Eggs: 89.2% Dairy: 34.7% For more information about Bon Appétit's Farm to Fork program, visit http://bamco.com/sustainable-food-service/farm-to-fork. For more information about the Real Food Campus Commitment, visit http://www.realfoodchallenge.org/commitment.