What would you do with €2.5 trillion? This is the amount the EU spends every year on public procurement. With the rules that shape this spending up for revision, there is a multi-trillion euro opportunity to serve better food in schools, hospitals, prisons and care homes – while simultaneously supporting farmers and nourishing local economies. Ashley Parsons reports.
Starting this September, school lunches in Poland are going to look and taste a little different. Following a hard-won campaign by the GreenREV Institute, a new national reform will mandate a weekly plant-based meal across 36,000 institutions, reaching 4.5 million children. For the first time, plant-based options will be formally recognized in school catering standards. It’s a systemic shift in a country where, until now, meat-based dishes were included in 80% of school lunches and 1 in 5 schools served meat every single day.
Could Poland be a marker for European change in public procurement? In Brussels, the European Commission is preparing for a 2026 revision of the EU’s public procurement directives. Don’t be fooled by the dry-sounding title: public procurement is in fact a very juicy slice of spending that eats up €2.5 trillion every year. The EU’s public procurement framework shapes what ends up on the public plate: the food that is served in our schools, hospitals, prisons, and care homes. It’s a bill that adds up to 14% of the EU’s GDP. But currently, this massive portion of public money is a missed opportunity—favoring large industrial suppliers, and ignoring the long-term health and environmental costs of cheap food.
Why Public Procurement Matters
“In prisons, good food can offer hope and dignity that is essential to rehabilitation. Poor diets lead to unhealthy prisoners, who become an expensive burden on society upon release.”
Kevin Morgan of Cardiff University lays out why we have been failing at this since 2002. Speaking on May 7th at the Serving the Public with Good Food for All webinar, organized by the ‘Good Food For All’ European Citizens’ Initiative, IFOAM Organics Europe, ICLEI Europe and the EU Food Policy Coalition, Morgan argued that we are currently using our hospitals to provide “clinical solutions to the societal problem of ultra-processed foods.” According to Morgan, we serve the very food that makes people sick in the buildings where we try to make them well. And in schools, he advocates for a “Whole School Approach,” where children learn about healthy food in the classroom as well as on their plates.
In a recent letter to EU Commissioners, the EU Food Policy Coalition argues that food should not be treated like any other commodity. By recognizing food as a strategic sector, the EU could leverage its procurement rules to prioritize resilience, security of supply, and “strategic autonomy”, instead of race-to-the-bottom practices.
Eating our way to Strategic Autonomy?
It’s surely a no-brainer that food, and eating—something we usually do three times a day—should be a strategic priority. But in the eyes of current EU law, buying a kilo of carrots is legally identical to buying a box of paperclips. By aligning food with “Open Strategic Autonomy” (the same framework used for energy and defense) the EU would give public authorities the legal teeth to prioritize the public good over the private bottom line.
This shift from the lowest price to the Most Advantageous Tender (MAT) is the only way to break the stagnation we see in places like France, where despite the ambitious EGAlim law, organic sourcing remains stuck at a measly 11.8%. Without mandatory standards that prioritize agroecology, seasonal diversity and short supply chains, we remain trapped in a system that favors carbon-heavy transport over local resilience.
Investing in the Next Generation – When local politics takes on the school canteen
Groundwork that’s going places
In France, municipalities like Plessé and Romainville are a lesson in rethinking public procurement. They’ve proven that the high cost of nourishing food isn’t an immovable barrier; it’s a symptom of a broken management model.
The rural municipality of Plessé stopped being a passive customer of industrial food and became a producer of its own school meals through direct management (régie directe) of its school canteen. By bypassing the industrial middleman, Plessé now channels back into the local economy what Marine Jobert describes as the “75% logistics tax“.
Marine Jobert is part of Collectif les pieds dans le plat, a group working to support the food transition via a “delicious revolution” in school canteens. Their data reveals the hidden math that keeps canteens stuck: in the standard industrial model, a staggering 75% of the budget is swallowed by logistics, transport, and corporate overhead, leaving a mere 25% for the actual food.
But one working-class suburb of Paris has flipped this logic. Romainville has the political appetite to serve up health and food security to its school children, and the municipality has proven that fresh, local preparation of school meals can be cheaper than the industrial alternative.
“When you own the kitchen and employ skilled staff, you aren’t paying for a truck driver and a corporate office; you’re paying for a farmer and a cook.”
Reframing the question can be a good national strategy too. In Poland, the campaign for plant-based school lunches has proven that changing the plate starts with changing the rulebook. Morgan Janowicz of GreenREV Institute, part of the coalition behind the campaign, explained that they sidestepped the climate culture wars by “walking through the door of health and child nutrition.” When plant-based meals are mandated by a public health regulation, procurement and supply chains follow.
The Biggest Challenge is Scaling Up
Dr. Morgan said it well: “Good practice is a bad traveler.” These existing good models from France and Poland work in their local and national contexts, islands of resilience. But what about the rest of the EU’s public plates?
This brings us back to Brussels. The 2026 EU revision is more than a technical update; it is a fork in the road for our collective food system. This revision is our chance to stop treating food like paperclips and start treating it as the foundation of our future. We are deciding whether to continue spending our €2.5 trillion lever on a race to the bottom with cheap industrial calories, or to finally invest in a plate that offers health, resilience, and dignity.
ARC2020 is a member of the coalition behind the Good Food For All! European Citizens’ Initiative. Click here to find out more about this initiative, and add your signature if you agree with the demands.
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