Part of the SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions Toolkit.*
The Healthy Food Procurement Initiative in Los Angeles County is a PSE Change intervention designed to improve the nutrition standards of the county’s food service contracts. In 2011, the County of Los Angeles (“County”) Board of Supervisors adopted Healthy Food Promotion in Los Angeles County Food Service Contracts, a motion aimed at County departmental food procurement policies and practices as they relate to nutrition. The motion established a process for the County’s Department of Public Health to develop nutrition standards and/or healthy food procurement practices in new and renewing Requests for Proposals (RFP) for food service and vending contracts across County departments.
The materials supporting this institutional policy have been carefully developed by the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health, Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention. They are meant to serve as example documents, not exact guidelines for successful intervention/policy replication. Provide credit to the LA County Department of Public Health when reproducing materials in the original, or adapted, form:
- Model policy– Healthy Food Promotion in LA County Food Service Contracts
- “Creating Healthy Food Environments” policy brief
- Model memo from the Department of Public Health’s Health Officer to all the County Departments informing them of the Board of Supervisors’ motion and its implications
- Sample Food Service Requirements for Concession Operations at a County of Los Angeles Cafeteria, 2011
- Nutrition Standards Implementation Guides (available for vending machine beverages and snacks, and a sodium reduction plan)
- Case study on the vending machine program
- Policy brief on working with public and private hospitals
- Pilot Tested
Center TRT developed an evaluation logic model and evaluation plan for a policy modeled after the Healthy Food Promotion in Los Angeles County Food Service Contracts institutional policy. The policy aims to increase access and availability of healthy foods and beverages in county departments and programs by including nutrition standards and healthy food promotion practices into food service contract requests for proposals. The logic model is intended to guide the evaluation process (as opposed to the planning process); the evaluation plan focuses on the implementation and effectiveness of an approach similar to LA County’s. The evaluation plan addresses the reach, adoption, extent of implementation, and effectiveness of a policy modeled after the LA County policy. The evaluation is a pre-post design with no comparison group. This evaluation plan provides guidance on evaluation questions and types and sources of data for both process and outcome evaluation. We suggest a variety of data collection tools throughout the evaluation plan.
* SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States is a compilation of interventions. The toolkit was developed by USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, The Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT), and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the USDA. It is designed and updated to help state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify evidence-based obesity prevention programs and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) strategies and interventions to include in their SNAP-Ed plans.