Welcome to the 3rd Best-ReMaP Newsletter

The workshop revealed that the Slovenian good practice could be a good starting point for many countries to build organised food procurement from the ground up. Katarzyna Brukało from the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland said that ‘We would like to use the Slovenian practice as a benchmark in Poland…because we are only at the beginning of this work. Slovenians could show us how to improve the food quality standards of public procurements.’ Vesna Pazin, dietitian and public procurement officer from Bosnia and Herzegovina made a similar statement: ‘This project will help our local governments to see the bigger picture’ and added that ‘the best part of the Slovenian practice is the transparency, you can see all products in the same place.’ Anita Varga from the National Institute of Pharmacy and Nutrition in Hungary, said that ’the Slovenian practice, including the food catalogue is very inspiring. A great advantage of the catalogue is that it facilitates the product overview on the market, which can be an extremely time-consuming process otherwise. Besides this, the use of the tool can result in higher proportion of local food with less administrative burden.’ 

Other countries see an opportunity to transfer elements from the Slovenian model to further develop their existing, well-established system. Mette Svendgaard Høgholm from Copenhagen Municipality highlighted that ‘… connecting all the data and make all the suppliers fill in the information is a great feature of the Slovenian practice, and in Denmark we struggle with that.’ Gabriele Antony from the Austrian National Public Health Institute pointed out that ‘… one of the most important strength of the Slovenian practice is transparency, and public institutions have the opportunity to get all this information about the food stuffs, which is a great advantage during tendering and procurement…in Austria public procurement officers do not have the time to get all this information…we will try to make a knowledge transfer of what we learnt in Best-ReMaP JA to our procurement agency at the provinces that use the current (Austrian) tool (for public procurement). We will try to build this bridge.’ 

Dr Venetia-Maria Vraila from the Institute of Child Health in Greece said that ‘the tool helps everything to be well-organized and to see multiple products at the same time’, while Eleftheria Papachristou from Harokopio University, Greece added that another advantage of the Slovenian model is that it supports ‘the inclusion of small producers, while in Greece we only have big retailers, which is important for the local economy’. Tiina Sirkjärvi from the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare shared that in the Finnish public procurement system ‘we have many parts that are overlapping with the Slovenian practice, for example the centralized criteria… and we are investigating with open mind for new advantages. Nevertheless, it is important for us to be involved in the process.’ 

In addition to the presentation of the Slovenian good practice, participating Member States were also given the opportunity to show how food procurement and public catering is currently organised in their countries. The presentations revealed many interesting facts and provided an opportunity to exchange experiences and knowledge. Some countries already have a highly sophisticated public catering system, which further encourages other Member States to follow these examples and enhance their own processes. For example, in the public institutions in Finland free meals are provided to all children and young adults between 6 and 19 years of age, while in Denmark, in the province of Copenhagen, 95% of the raw materials sourced are of organic origin.