The numbers are huge. That’s the first thing you learn. Across Canada, our universities, colleges, hospitals, office towers and factories are the nation’s top away-from-home food market.
With its 65,000 undergrads, the University of Toronto has a network of 10 cafeterias at its downtown campus alone, so it’s no wonder that to an outsider, lunchtime seems a pandemonium of clattering trays, plates and ladles.
Amazingly, everyone does get fed, yet the logistics must be so frightening that the addition of just one more complication would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Read Also
Riding the tariff rollercoaster
Farmers are accustomed to roller-coaster years. But the current geopolitical windstorm is something else entirely. On his cattle operation near…
In fact, one very large complication arose in 2006 when the university decided to insist on the greatest possible quantity of locally grown food in its kitchens. Yet the students are still mounding their plates.
The story why it works involves five different layers of businesses in the food delivery system, and how each was able to get more benefits by adding its skills to the local food juggernaut.
At the centre, not surprisingly, is Local Food Plus (LFP), a Toronto organization dedicated to helping local farmers connect with local food buyers. (Read about LFP in the January issue of Country Guide).
Sharing the limelight, though, is Aramark Canada, a division of the huge U. S.-based corporation that holds the food-service contract at the University of Toronto and at an endless list of other institutions and businesses across the country.
Founded in southern California in 1936 when Davre Davidson hit the road with his Dodge, confident he could talk factory owners into letting him put peanut vending machines in their plants, Aramark today is massive. In fact, it may be one of the biggest companies most of us have never heard of.
In investment circles, however, Aramark is well respected. Fortune magazine, for instance, consistently ranks Aramark in the top echelon of its most admired companies.
With 270,000 employees in 22 countries, Aramark is a power player in industries ranging from food service to providing uniforms and work clothing. It manages buildings for scores of clients, provides the staff that clean thousands of hotel rooms, and delivers high-tech cleaning services for the labs at pharma and biotech companies.
Altogether, it adds up to rapid growth and $15 billion in annual sales for the Philadelphia headquartered company. And it’s all due to the company’s extraordinary ability to please clients by efficiently and consistently doing complicated things.
It isn’t that Aramark tries to operate under the radar screen. It’s that its customers are big companies and big institutions. Administrators need to know its name, but the people sliding their trays through its cafeterias don’t.
That may be changing.
“It’s nice to have a face on your food,” says Tina Horsley, director of wellness and sustainability for Aramark Canada, as we talk about the locally grown food that Aramark dishes out at the university. (Who knew that a food service company would have a director of wellness and sustainability?)
In 2006, Aramark began buying certified local-sustainable food and helping its distributor network connect with certified farmers. The contrast in scale between the operations is striking. It’s like David and Goliath: small family farms and a corporation with a workforce bigger than many Canadian municipalities. But it’s now year three and many of the kinks have been worked out, say Aramark, the university, and the certifying body, Local Food Plus (LFP).
It’s been a big change in the way Tony De Gregorio does Gregorio, Aramark’s district manager for the University of Toronto downtown campus, notes the company typically deals with intermediaries in the distributor network. But along with the normal middlemen and aggregators, the local food initiative also brings in a different sort of intermediary here: LFP, the non-profit organization that certifies farms and food processors as local and sustainable.
To get certified, the farms and processors need to meet criteria designed to ensure environmental sustainability, soil and water conservation, worker welfare, humane animal handling, protection of biodiversity, and reduction of on-farm energy use.
Making it work
LFP is a critical component, Horsley says. It means Aramark can turn to a cedible third party to say that the food it is buying is local and sustainable — and it means that Aramark doesn’t have to develop and enforce its own standards, something that Horsley says isn’t in the cards because Aramark doesn’t have those farm-level resources or skills. “It’s been fantastic because they (LFP) help identify growers for us.”
Anne MacDonald, director of ancillary services at the university, points out that the differences in scale have sometimes been challenging, saying, “The bar is set so high in some of these cases, set with very, very large organizations in
