In early August, Partners for Public Good (PPG) announced a new peer learning network based on value-based food purchasing. At the core of this work is a collaborative that currently involves 13 cities and counties that are working towards improved food purchases to promote public health and serve local economies.

By sharing promising practices, meeting together, hearing from successful programs and discussing challenges, communities have been able to work with city and county procurement offices to help transform the kinds of foods purchased in local hospitals, homeless shelters, senior centers, schools, jails and government-supported food banks.

The goal of the program is to address issues that have often plagued institutional food purchasing. The problem? “People in government institutions are often served food that is not very good. It’s often processed. It doesn’t have a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, and we know that has a negative impact on public health,” says Brittany Peats, the PPG assistant director who works closely with the city/county Food for Public Good Collaborative. “

Institutional food purchases have both an individual and community impact. “At the larger community level, institutions are spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on food and so this is a real opportunity to invest in things that the community wants to invest in,” says Peats. 

Values-based food aligns with community values “whether that’s around environmental sustainability or public health or other values that align with food purchasing” says Peats. “Instead of purchasing all the food from a multinational company, how about purchasing from local producers? Local Farmers? That’s really helping the economy and it’s helping to strengthen the vibrancy of the community.”

The current consortium was made up of cities and counties that had already adopted value-based food purchasing policies, but PPG’s object is also to encourage development of those policies in other governments. “We would love to talk to anybody who is anywhere along the continuum of thinking about adopting a policy, having adopted it or are implementing it,” says Peats.

Moving forward, the plan is to add new members to the collaborative and to begin publishing case studies that illustrate successes and lessons learned. PPG began working with the collaborative through a pilot program in March, but the work had started several years before through a peer learning network, aligned with food procurement policies created by the  Center for Good Food Purchasing.  The network was created by the Food Systems Action Lab at Illinois Tech Institute of Design.   

The thirteen cities and counties that are currently part of the collaborative are: Alachua County, FL, Austin, TX, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago and Cook County, the City and County of Honolulu; San Diego County; Santa Clara County; Los Angeles County, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Partners for Public Good was officially launched in November 2025 and was the subject of an article on this website, titled “Moving the Needle on Government Performance”. The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization works with cities, counties and states on a variety of management and performance topics, including procurement, staffing, technology and budgeting. Earlier work involving PPG staff was centered on procurement research and the creation of the Procurement Excellence Network, which was incubated at the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab.

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