Public food procurement for Italian schools: results from analytical and content analyses

Purpose: The study objective was to understand if uniformity of approach exists in evaluation methods of public food tender for schools at national and local level. This purpose was divided into three sub-objectives: (1) to extract the main criteria, (2) to document the synthesizing findings process and (3) to prioritize the different decision-making alternatives through pairwise comparisons. Design/methodology/approach: To achieve the sub-objectives (1) and (2), a content analysis of the Italian food tenders was carried out. Analytic hierarchy process was used to evaluate and compare the importance of various food tender evaluation criteria (3). The inclusion criteria were: cities' selection; metro area population; population density; duration of the contract; years. Findings: Six public food tenders were analyzed. The first one concerned the National legislation guidelines. The remaining five food tenders were categorized according to the city investigated. Four macro-categories (Food quality; Sustainability; Resources; Ancillary services) were classified. AHP revealed that “Food quality” and “Resources” categories have greater importance in the evaluation phase of almost all cities investigated. Originality/value: This study in-depth analyzes each criterion used to evaluate public food tenders, providing a new methodological framework for assigning scores to clusters of criteria. Since the literature search did not reveal any previous study on a quantitative evaluation of elements such as short supply chain, organic food and environmental impacts on public food tenders, this research delivers interesting results and fills this knowledge gap.