Scotland Excel welcomes Good Food Nation consultation analysis

The consultation on the draft Good Food Nation (GFN) plan for Scotland ran earlier this year and in the recently-published consultation response, the role of public procurement was highlighted as an important enabler for local supply chains.

Scotland Excel welcomes the analysis as we continue to build on the work already delivered across our food portfolio.

Over the last 15 years, Scotland Excel has led the way in public food procurement, pushing our food portfolio to deliver value, quality produce for councils, while creating wider social benefits.

Our food portfolio is now worth £83m a year and has six frameworks: groceries; frozen foods; meats; milk; fruit and vegetables and bread, rolls and bakery products.

These frameworks help to supply the products served up in schools, nurseries, care homes and community centres across the country. 

Councils are increasingly looking to source local produce to deliver a positive social impact for their communities and reduce food miles and CO2. That’s why, as our food contracts have evolved over recent years, we have looked for innovative ways to use public procurement to make sure more locally sourced products are available through our frameworks.

We stepped up our role to make sure public sector food contracts are more accessible to Scottish businesses.

We were keen to support the government’s Dairy Action Plan to include more Scottish produce in our groceries framework for yoghurt, butter, cheese and margarine.  So, a secondary price list was included within the tender. This allowed suppliers to offer Scottish dairy products - to give councils the option of Scottish products.

To bring more Scottish produce onto the meats framework, while still being in line with procurement regulations, we were able to specifically ask for Scotch Beef and Scotch Lamb by including Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) in our tender.  As a result, more than 77 per cent of produce purchased on the framework last year was from Scotland.

When developing the frozen food framework, suppliers were given the opportunity to bid to supply only to create opportunities for smaller companies that didn’t have national delivery logistics in place.  This approach was so successful that it was also followed for the groceries framework, leading to the appointment of five SMEs to the framework.

Across the whole food portfolio, spending by councils on Scottish products has continued to rise. Over the past seven years, it’s increased year on year, and now accounts for more than 33 per cent of all spend through our food contracts. 

As well as looking at sourcing Scottish products where possible, we’ve been working with suppliers to help bring more Scottish SMEs on to our frameworks.  We split our frameworks into different council areas where a supplier can bid for one, any or all 32 council areas without being penalised.  In some cases, an council area will also be split into further regional lots if they know of local suppliers that may be able to bid for certain parts of their authority but not all of it. 

We’re always working to improve our food portfolio to keep making our frameworks accessible to small Scottish businesses.

And we look forward to the amended draft GFN Plan going before parliament for consideration, as the country continues to work towards being a Good Food Nation.

Hugh Carr is Scotland Excel’s Director of Strategic Procurement. This article was sponsored by Scotland Excel.