Public Food Procurement: A Systematic Literature Review

The use by governments of their purchasing power to achieve social objectives is a practice that dates back to the 19th centuries when regulations were issued in both the USA and England establishing fair wages or maximum working hours per day for firms working under public contracts (McCrudden,2004). Public food procurement (PFP) is another example of how a policy instrument has been used to “link” different objectives at once. We attempted to undertake a first systematic review of the scientific literature that deals with PFP. The first striking evidence is that the number of papers per year shows an almost exponential growth during the last decade providing support to the relevance of this review. Differently from the literature on Public procurement where the themes of contracting and cost minimisation are prevalent, the literature on PFP is centred on the concepts of localisation and structured demand and its impacts on food chain actors as well as citizen-consumers and on sustainability at large. We provide a conceptual scheme of the PFP literature largely based on the concept of linkage that has been first proposed in law and regulation studies and is declined in a rather specific fashion in this field of public procurement.