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USDA Department: Healthy Meals Incentives Initiative
Grant focus: school food system and supply chain
Awards Range: $500,000-$1,000,000
Match: Inquire further
Intended applicants: Projects must be collaboratively administered by at least three partners, with one lead partner and at least two partner organizations. All partners should be involved in implementing the project. Teams must include at least one school food authority, and at least one partner from industry. Potential partners include:
- School food authorities that operate the National School Lunch Program (required)
- Food industry (required):
- Food manufacturers or producers
- Food processors
- Food aggregators (e.g., food hubs)
- Food distributors
- Growers and producers (e.g., farms, orchards, ranches, fisheries)
- Food support organizations, including food systems–focused nonprofits
- Public sector agency (e.g., local, county, or state government agency or department)
- Indian Tribal Organizations
- Community-based organizations
- Small businesses
- Other food system partners
Summary: Applicants should propose innovative and collaborative approaches that reimagine the school food system and that could be sustained and scaled elsewhere. We encourage applicants to think creatively about transformational partnerships and projects, particularly those that bring new industry into the school food supply chain.
We invite applicants to submit a proposal for grant funding to support projects that show clear potential for achieving one or more of these goals:
- improving the K-12 school food supply chain by incentivizing innovation and building partnerships between various entities of the food system, including manufacturers or producers;
- reducing barriers for schools related to sourcing, ordering, processing, and/or storing locally-sourced foods and beverages;
- supporting school nutrition teams in using fresh local ingredients, being responsive to student preferences and cultural relevance, and increasing scratch cooking;
- leveraging social responsibility of food industry to address innovative solutions for the school food system; and
- identifying sustainable solutions and best practices for the K-12 food system that are scalable and replicable.
