Dynamic food procurement and cross-sectoral tensions: The practical and contractual complexities of digitizing local school food supply

Localising school food procurement has been the subject of international scholarship for several decades, including in the UK, where examples of isolated good practice have emerged. The benefits of local school food are based on three key potentials - sustainable food system transformation, the special market agency of public authorities, and the cultural benefits of localising school meals. A new technological innovation called Dynamic Food Procurement (DFP) has recently enabled the efficient bundling of local produce for school catering buyers. Using a cross-sectoral Living Lab methodology in the English county of Gloucestershire, this article describes a governance experiment to apply DFP technology to optimise local procurement for a school meals service feeding over 18,000 pupils daily. While the Living Lab created an iterative, transparent and inclusive structure to plan the introduction of DFP, the experiment faced entrenched commercial practices, policy inconsistency and legal complexities to reveal the limited leverage of the work at a large territorial scale. The main contribution of the article is to review the potentials of purchasing power of public food with finer-grained practical experiences of local authority school procurement policy