Chicago Food Policy Action Council

- a descriptive Whole View analysis

Project aim

To gain insights into how the Good Food Purchasing Policy (GFPP) program can help shape a healthy food ecosystem in Chicago. The project incorporates the four core values for the functioning of GFPP, being: 

• Strengthening regional food economies, 

• Reducing environmental impacts, 

• Promoting fair treatment of food workers, 

• Encouraging healthy meal procurement. 

The Challenge

A limited number of organizations operate most of the food production and purchasing in Chicago. The currently observed pattern is that corporate food firms use their scale advantages to produce food efficiently and thus dominate the market, with little regard paid to value categories for good food. The interactions between institutional buyers, consumers, and foodservice providers are determined by the status quo, which scores poorly on these five identified value categories:

• Animal welfare,

• Equality,

• Healthy nutrition,

• Environmental sustainability,

• Fairly treated and valued workforce.

The central lack of insight is the poor understanding of the system dynamics that affect food purchasing and production practices in Chicago. CFPAC's recent initiatives aim to implement GFPP to solve these issues. Promoting local good food initiatives helps reduce the negative consequences of the current state of the system. The aim is thus to support local, fair, and sustainable food systems.

The desired emergent patterns incorporate a food system that mitigates the five issues currently encountered. The project aims to generate insight into the effectiveness of interventions on the behavior of food purchasing practices that requires a structured system analysis and response.

The research objective involved exploring the effects of three core concepts:

1. the policy interventions that affect the GFPP adoption rate among actors, 

2. the dynamics of interaction among all actors, and

3. policy and price levers that change actors' composition and behavior. 

The desire to empower sustainable, local food networks largely rests on mitigating unclear effects of interventions and expected resistance towards a local policy.

Initial hypothesis for emergent behavior

Because food procurement awards contract to the lowest bidder that meets standards, food purchasing practices generally only meet the bare minimum standards. It results in large quantities of cheap food at the cost of workforce equality, local economies, animal welfare, and the environment. 

Consumers are culturally used to purchasing unhealthy but cheap food, and therefore show relatively little interest in more expensive good food, and This subsequently leads to institutional buyers, food service providers, and food suppliers not investing much into good food production, as the market for this, is somewhat limited.

Final Outcome