BRASIS — Public Food Procurement & Home-Grown School Feeding

The gap

A school meal can meet every nutrition standard and still be almost entirely ultra-processed.

Nutrition standards regulate what a meal must contain. Whether they also govern what a public buyer can purchase is a design choice, and most systems have not made it.

Brazil did. Its school feeding law requires that at least 45% of the federal transfer be spent directly with family farms, a floor raised from 30% with effect from January 2026. Even there, many municipalities fall short of the target, blocked by supplier invoicing, delivery logistics, and sanitary compliance.

The instrument that closes the gap is the purchase itself: the specification, the threshold, the contract. Volume is what gives it force. A single municipality buying for 53 schools moved enough to bring eighteen farms into an institutional market for the first time. That is where BRASIS works.

Founder experience · Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil · 2013–2014

One municipality, from a standing start.

The constraint was never demand, and it was never a shortage of farmers.

1,234 family farmers in the municipality Plus 7 cooperatives and 12 associations, none holding the legal registration needed to contract collectively.

18 contracted to supply, with one cooperative Capped at R$20,000 per producer registration per year, a ceiling that forces aggregation across many small suppliers.

12,000 students reached, across 53 schools Eighteen line items across a three-month supply period.

0 supplier responses to the municipality's first public call in 2011 — not one farmer came forward, and the mandate sat idle for two years

Five months →

1st family-farming purchase, after our founder took the technical lead

This is the founder's own professional experience from 2013–2014, not a prior BRASIS engagement. The mandate itself has operated at national scale since 2009 and still runs. What is shown here is a mature system worked from the inside, not a pilot.

Where local sourcing breaks down

Buying local is easier to fund than it is to run.

Programmes rarely fail at the decision to buy local. They fail at the solicitation nobody answers, the supplier who cannot invoice, the delivery that arrives when the field decides rather than when the menu does. The same constraints recur wherever institutional demand meets smallholder supply, in hospitals and care settings and correctional facilities as much as in schools. Seven of them are set out below, each one worked through inside Brazil's National School Feeding Programme (PNAE), which reaches roughly 40 million students and has required purchasing from family farms since 2009.

Where it typically breaks What our founder has run

Aggregation Minimum order volumes exceed what a single farm can guarantee year-round, so the bid defaults to a national distributor. Eighteen family farmers and one cooperative contracted alongside each other, so that no single farm had to guarantee the volume on its own.

Qualification Competitive bid requirements are built for large distributors, and invoicing systems assume administrative infrastructure most family farms do not have. A public call ranked on a tiered priority order — local producers first, then agrarian-reform settlements and traditional communities, then certified organic and agroecological suppliers, then collective groups over individuals — with rural extension issuing producer registrations and training farmers to supply.

Seasonality Menus are set months in advance, against a harvest calendar nobody controls. Kitchens are rarely equipped to absorb raw product either: in US districts, only 17% of schools cook from scratch daily and over 90% of directors report gaps in staff, equipment, and training. Seasonal supply, menu planning, and institutional demand aligned across the school year.

Delivery Dozens of sites, small vehicles, and no distributor logistics behind them, under a per-meal budget that already falls short of what the meal costs to produce. Producers delivered to a single municipal receiving point, where consignments were checked against their written specification before the municipality distributed to the schools. One drop-off per producer instead of fifty-three.

Standards Specifications are written around what large distributors already sell, and a small producer cannot meet them. Every line item carried a written specification covering quality grade, size, handling, shelf life, packaging, and labelling, with inspection certificates required for animal products and organic certificates where an organic claim was made.

Payment Payment timelines of 30 to 60 days are more than a small operation can absorb. A producer who doubts payment will arrive does not bid at all. Fear of not being paid was the binding constraint on participation. Direct channels between suppliers and municipal offices were built specifically to remove that uncertainty.

Ownership Switching suppliers is a relationship decision, not just a cost one, and procurement officers are institutionally risk-averse. Local sourcing sits between food service, procurement, and agriculture, and belongs to none of them. One named technical officer carried formal responsibility across the whole chain — menu, specification, purchase, supplier relationships, storage, and transport — and coordinated education, agriculture, and rural extension around it.

What does and does not transfer is the first thing an engagement settles. The record behind the right-hand column is above.

What we do

Three ways into the same problem.

An engagement can start at any of them. A diagnosis that does not become a purchasing model changes nothing, and a model that is never measured may not survive a change of administration. Most of our work is a single problem: moving institutional purchasing toward fresh and minimally processed food without breaking a programme people depend on to eat.

Diagnose

Find where the system is losing food, producers, or money, and why the rule on paper is not the practice on the ground.

Institutional food procurement system assessment
Institutional arrangements, roles & decision rights
Implementation barrier analysis
Producer participation diagnostics, including women's participation and access
Supply, seasonality & aggregation constraints
Legal & regulatory framework assessment
Baseline assessment of processed & ultra-processed purchasing

Design

Build the purchasing model, the rules it runs on, and the food standards it enforces — so that what is specified is what can be supplied.

Purchasing models, structured demand & contract structures
Solicitation, bid documents & inclusion criteria
Price research & fair pricing for small producers
Nutrition standards, sanitary & regulatory requirements in product specifications
Minimally processed food thresholds & ultra-processed reduction, using NOVA and nutrient profile models to define what qualifies for purchase
Alignment with values-based purchasing frameworks already in use, on the local economy, small supplier and nutrition criteria
Supplier readiness & capacity building for small farms and cooperatives
Operational workflows, roles & responsibilities

Evaluate

Test whether what was specified is what arrived, who it reached, and what the spending did in the local economy, and build the monitoring arrangements that keep answering those questions once we are gone.

Programme evaluation, quantitative & qualitative
Scoping & narrative evidence reviews (PRISMA-ScR)
Analysis of national survey & administrative data
Producer participation & market access outcomes
Nutritional quality & ultra-processed content of what is delivered (NOVA)
Socioeconomic & distributional effects, including outcomes for women producers
Monitoring frameworks & policy-to-practice learning

Implementation support, not operational delivery.

BRASIS helps clients become implementation-ready, up to the point where a purchasing system can be run. Buying, delivering, and serving the food stays with the client or its designated implementation partner.

We state the boundary up front because it changes what a scope of work should contain, and what it should cost.

Selected writing

What our work looks like on the page.

Independent work by our team: policy analysis, methods, and published research. Not client engagements. Available on request.

Procurement as a Policy Lever: Improving Dietary Quality in U.S. School Meal Programs
Policy analysis · 2026 · L. Hutchinson

Evaluates three governance models for a mandatory procurement threshold in US school meals: uniform federal mandate, state flexibility, and a hybrid federal floor, assessed against equity, fiscal, administrative, political, and system-alignment criteria, and sets out an implementation framework drawing on municipal PNAE experience.
Lessons Learned for Emergency Feeding During Modifications to Eleven School Feeding Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Peer-reviewed · 2022 · M. F. Grilo, co-author

Comparative analysis of how eleven national school feeding programmes restructured delivery under emergency conditions, covering programmes that together reach more than 85 million students — and what the substitutions revealed about each system's underlying procurement and distribution capacity.
Applying the Nova food classification to food product databases using discriminative ingredients: a methodological proposal
Peer-reviewed · 2025 · M. F. Grilo, first author

A method for identifying ultra-processed products in large food composition and product databases from their discriminative ingredients, making the NOVA classification operational at the scale a procurement system works at. The approach informed the 2026 Healthy Eating Research expert panel recommendations on ultra-processed foods in the United States.
Factors associated with adhesion and discontinuity to the “Food Basket” program, part of the Food Acquisition Program (PAA) in Limeira, SP
Peer-reviewed · 2019 · M. F. Grilo, first author

Interviews with 68 beneficiaries of a municipal programme that bought produce directly from a family-farming settlement and distributed it through social assistance centres. Almost two-thirds did not receive the basket throughout the programme, and the reasons divide into the beneficiaries' own circumstances and the administration of the policy itself: late enrolment, waiting lists, selection bias, inflexible collection days, and communication gaps. A study of the receiving end of public food procurement, and of how much of what reaches a household is decided by administration rather than by supply.
Ultra-Processed Foods in Adolescent Obesity Prevention: A Scoping Review of the Current Evidence
Scoping review · 2025 · B. Castro, first author

Scoping review of intervention evidence on ultra-processed food consumption among adolescents, conducted under PRISMA guidance and presented at the American Society for Nutrition annual meeting — the evidence base behind specifying what institutional food programmes should and should not buy.

Who does the work

A deliberately small team, assembled around one problem.

BRASIS does not maintain permanent staff. It brings together procurement implementation, nutrition and food regulation, evidence and evaluation, and applied economics, all pointed at the same object. Between us, both of Brazil's public food purchasing programmes are covered: the school feeding mandate, implemented at municipal level by our founder, and the food acquisition programme, which buys from family farms for social assistance networks and which Dr. Grilo has studied at both the producer and the receiving end.

Ludmilla Hutchinson

Founder & Principal Consultant

Food systems and nutrition policy professional with a Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH), concentration in Rural Health, from Campbell University. As a Registered Nutritionist in Brazil (CRN), she led municipal implementation of Brazil's family-farming procurement mandate under PNAE, working with rural extension agencies to bring first-time smallholder suppliers into an institutional market, with the programme's delivery independently audited by a federal university under Brazil's school feeding law, for which she was the technical point of contact. She has since worked on comparative procurement policy across Brazilian and US school meal systems. She works in Portuguese, English, and Spanish, and the PNAE model she ran is the same one that has been adapted for home-grown school feeding across Lusophone Africa.

Her analytical focus is on how procurement rules, financing, and institutional arrangements determine what a food programme actually delivers, and where that chain breaks.

The collaborators

Mariana Fagundes Grilo, PhD

Nutrition policy & food standards

Postdoctoral fellow in international health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she is evaluating the new state-level restrictions on what SNAP benefits can be used to buy. Her research spans school feeding programmes across Latin America, family-farming procurement under Brazil's food acquisition programme (PAA), which buys from smallholders for social assistance rather than for schools, and the food classification systems, including NOVA, WHO and Codex frameworks, used to define what counts as ultra-processed and what qualifies for purchase. She built the standardised classification protocol behind an eight-country analysis of more than 240,000 packaged products across Africa and Asia, and provides the methodological guidance, quality control, and capacity-building support to the national research teams running it. Her work is cited by Brazil's health regulatory agency, by the Philippine House of Representatives' policy research department, and in the US expert panel recommendations on defining ultra-processed foods.

Bianca Castro, PhD

Food regulation, evidence & institutional systems

Health services researcher whose doctoral work examined ultra-processed food consumption in the US and policy responses to it. She has analysed food regulation implementation across four Latin American countries and assessed feasibility of comparable US measures, with expertise in scoping and narrative evidence reviews, complex survey analysis, and mixed-methods evaluation. Behind that sits a decade of process redesign, standard operating procedures, and federal compliance auditing in public health, turning diagnosis into institutional action. As a PMP-certified project manager, she brings the operational rigour to move policy from recommendation to rollout.

Engagement

Tell us where the purchasing is breaking down.

Governments are expanding school meal programmes at pace, including under the School Meals Coalition, and procurement is where those commitments either reach local producers or do not. BRASIS takes on focused consulting engagements, technical assignments, research collaborations, and specialist contributions to larger projects. Working languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish.

info@brasisconsulting.com

We work with

Multilateral and international organisations
National governments and public institutions
State agencies and subnational governments
City and county governments implementing values-based food procurement
School districts and school food authorities
Farm-to-school networks and implementing partners
Foundations and philanthropic funders
Research institutions and consulting partners

The menu is written in the contract.