Sustainable and Healthy School Food Procurement: From Policy to Tender Design in Portugal

Public Food Procurement can shape diets, markets, and territorial food systems, yet its strategic potential depends on how policy objectives are translated into tender design, contract management, and territorial food policy governance. The study draws on a predominantly international literature-based review of recommendations and selected country experiences to contextualize the analysis and identify relevant good practices. At the European Union and Portuguese levels, it systematically compares the applicable policy and legal frameworks and examines how they are translated into Portuguese procurement practice. It also situates Public Food Procurement within recent Portuguese debates on food transition, metropolitan food-system planning, and multifunctional agrifood parks. A qualitative documentary and regulatory analysis was conducted using a four-pillar framework—health, environmental, social and economic—operationalized through 28 criteria. The empirical corpus comprised 53 school food procurement procedures published in Portugal in 2023. Technical specifications or equivalent documents were unavailable for 15 procedures; the cases were retained in the fixed denominator of every criterion and pillar index, so the results shown are conservative full-corpus measures of publicly observable documentary incorporation. The reliability matrix retained all 53 procedures, but ordinal Krippendorff’s alpha was estimated from the 1064 units containing pairable ratings and was 0.625 (95% bootstrap CI: 0.576–0.667). Health achieved the highest aggregate index (37%), followed by environmental (17%), social (15%), and economic criteria (8%). Although 58% used Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) terminology, only 13% applied genuine multi-factor evaluation, while approximately four in five procedures were effectively price-only. The findings should therefore be interpreted as evidence of documentary incorporation and observability rather than supplier compliance or direct health and environmental outcomes. They indicate that a major documented weakness lies not in lack of legal authority, but in weak translation into measurable award criteria, contract clauses, monitoring mechanisms, and integrated local or regional food-policy strategies.