The European Commission adopted its long-awaited overhaul of EU public procurement rules today, and for the first time, food gets a dedicated place in the text. It’s a significant, hard-won result: as recently as this summer, the draft circulating among stakeholders treated food only as an optional environmental consideration, with no specific provision on food procurement at all.
Under the final text proposed by the Commission, public buyers will be able to factor in the quality and sustainability of food when setting specifications, award criteria or contract conditions, including animal welfare, nutritional value or health effects. The text explicitly lists the “quality and environmentally friendly production of food” among the environmental objectives public buyers can pursue. Schools and hospitals are also singled out, with a simplified direct-award system giving public authorities broad discretion to apply these food criteria to canteens, catering, school meals and meals-on-wheels.
This inclusion did not happen by default. It follows months of advocacy from organisations, including AAFT, that responded to the European Commission’s public consultation on the revision to call for food and animal welfare to be treated as core procurement criteria rather than an afterthought. It reportedly took a late push from Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen to secure food’s presence in the final stretch, after the Commission’s Vision for Agriculture and Food promised to put procurement to work for farmers and sustainable food.
What still needs to change
Getting food into the text was a necessary first step, but not the finish line. Under the new Article 53 on food procurement, public buyers “may” take these food and sustainability considerations into account. But nothing in the article requires them to.
There is one new safeguard: public buyers will now have to give real weight to quality, not just price, when awarding contracts. But quality can mean many things, delivery speed, technical performance, customer service, and nothing obliges buyers to use animal welfare or sustainable food as part of that quality score. A public authority could tick that box without ever considering what ends up on the plate.
We continue to call for food and animal welfare criteria to be made mandatory, not optional, so that the public money that flows through public procurement is systematically directed toward healthier, more sustainable, higher-welfare food products. We also want to see explicit support for plant-rich diets into implementation guidance, so that public contracts create stable, predictable demand for plant-based products. This is exactly the kind of stability farmers need to plan their transition towards more plant-based production.
The legislative file will now move to the European Parliament and Council, where AAFT will keep pushing to turn these food and animal welfare criteria from an option into a rule, so that public money becomes a real lever for healthier, more sustainable, higher-welfare food systems.
