Healthcare institutions in the United States face challenges from diseases related to diet, such as stroke, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. These diseases are some of the main causes of death and are linked to what people eat. Hospitals serve millions of meals every year. This creates a chance to improve patient health and help the environment by carefully choosing what food to buy.
The healthcare sector makes up almost 10% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. Hospitals cause a third of this because of energy use, waste, and how they get their food. Food production causes about 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Animal farming makes up 14.5% of this amount. These effects on the environment can also lead to health problems. So, focusing on sustainable food buying is important.
Sustainable food procurement in healthcare means choosing foods that are good for the environment, help social fairness, and improve nutrition. This includes picking local, organic, plant-based, and ethically produced foods when possible. It also means using less high-impact foods like red meat and heavily processed products.
Several groups and programs in the United States help hospitals and healthcare systems buy food in a more sustainable way.
Health Care Without Harm’s Healthy Food in Health Care Program works with over 2,000 healthcare facilities in North America. This program helps hospitals lower their impact on climate change by buying sustainable food, planning menus, managing food waste, and supporting food equity and animal welfare. The program tries to save natural resources while providing healthier food options for patients and staff.
Practice Greenhealth is a membership group that gives hospitals tools and a network to use sustainable buying strategies. Their resources help hospitals meet climate and fairness goals through plant-based menus and sustainable kitchen advice.
Many hospitals take part in food recovery and donation programs. For example, Davis Community Meals and Housing works with Sutter Health in Davis, California, to recover thousands of pounds of extra food. This saves money, lowers food waste, and helps fight food insecurity by giving food to people in need.
Food waste is a big problem in hospitals. The U.S. healthcare sector wastes about 288,401 tons of food each year. Food waste accounts for 10-15% of all waste hospitals make. This waste adds methane to landfills, which harms the climate. It also wastes food that could help people who do not have enough to eat.
If food loss dropped by 15%, it could feed more than 25 million Americans every year. Hospitals can save money by managing inventory better, ordering smarter, and donating extra edible food.
Programs like Lean Path help hospitals track and manage food waste. Lean Path uses technology to record how much food is thrown away and shows ways to reduce waste. Many hospitals also compost food scraps and use reusable dishes to cut down on trash.
Hospitals team up with local groups and food banks to share leftover food. This makes better use of food and helps the community. Cutting food waste lowers greenhouse gas emissions and helps hospitals run more smoothly.
Hospitals play a big role in their communities. Their food choices affect patient health, local economies, and the environment. Sustainable food buying supports healthier, cheaper food and helps local farmers and producers.
Many healthcare groups buy food from local farmers. This helps the economy and reduces pollution from transporting food long distances. Local foods are often fresher and more nutritious. This is good for patient meals and staff cafeterias.
The Delivering Community Benefit: Healthy Food Playbook encourages hospitals to fight food insecurity and diet-related illnesses through buying policies. Obesity is a top health concern in 71% of community health needs assessments, and 13% cite food insecurity or poor access to food. Making healthy food easier to get is important for better health.
Hospitals use their buying power to support regional sustainable food systems. These programs improve access to nutritious food, create jobs, and make the local food system stronger. Some programs give patients vouchers to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. This ties healthcare to social factors that affect health.
Some counties and cities have policies to help healthcare groups buy food more sustainably.
Multnomah County, Oregon, has the Food Action Plan “Grow and Thrive 2025” which aims to build an affordable, healthy, and sustainable food system in 15 years. This plan focuses on working with the community, buying local and organic foods, composting food waste, and buying responsibly.
The Green Meeting and Event Policy promotes sustainability by requiring composting, offering local organic foods, and cutting down on disposable materials at county events.
The Healthy Purchasing Initiative encourages transparency about harmful chemicals in products. Healthcare groups can use similar rules to choose suppliers who follow sustainable and ethical practices.
The Nutritional Labeling Act requires clear nutrition information in institutions. Hospitals can use these rules to help staff and patients make healthier and more sustainable food choices.
Urban centers worldwide, including in the U.S., have recognized their role in improving food systems by buying sustainably.
The C40 Good Food Cities Declaration, signed by 14 cities like Los Angeles, Milan, and London, shows a commitment to food policies that improve health and lower environmental damage.
These cities serve millions of meals each year in schools and hospitals. They focus on the Planetary Health Diet, which promotes meals with plant proteins, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables while limiting meat and dairy. This diet can cut food-related greenhouse gases by over 60%.
Los Angeles works on reducing food waste to “feed people, not landfills” and promote fair food access. These city policies affect hospital food buying and are part of larger climate actions. It shows that city leadership and hospital operations are connected.
Using sustainable, healthy diets in hospitals is important but not easy. Challenges include the high cost of sustainable foods, cultural resistance from staff and patients, and limited access to healthy options, especially in poor areas.
On the other hand, education about nutrition and the environment, financial rewards, and strong community support have helped spread sustainable diets. Human behavior plays a big role in food habits. Solutions must consider social and economic factors.
The “SHDs Barriers & Drivers” framework by Ludovica Principato and others helps healthcare leaders understand what affects diet choices and plan ways to support sustainable and healthy food.
More healthcare facilities are using technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to improve food buying and reduce waste efficiently.
AI systems can study large amounts of data about patient diets, food stocks, supply chains, and consumption. They help hospitals order better and avoid extra food. For example, AI predicts when certain foods will be needed more or less. This avoids over-ordering and spoilage.
Automation helps manage food services by linking buying, menu planning, inventory tracking, and waste monitoring. These systems alert staff when food is near expiration or when stock is too high.
Technology supports tools like Lean Path, which track food waste and create reports to help reduce it. IT managers can use this data to help leaders make better decisions and report on sustainability.
AI can also check the nutrition of meals being served. This helps hospitals move toward plant-based menus that match health guidelines. This support helps hospitals meet patient needs and environmental goals.
Medical practice administrators and owners benefit from sustainable food buying by lowering costs from food waste and improving patient satisfaction with healthier meals. Sustainable food also builds a good reputation and meets patient expectations about environmental care.
IT managers are important in setting up and maintaining the technology for automated purchasing and waste tracking. This reduces manual work and helps use data to improve processes continuously.
Hospitals and clinics that use sustainable food practices often follow regulations better and get more chances for grants and partnerships linked to community health.
Adding sustainability to healthcare food buying is now necessary to meet environmental and health challenges in the United States. Working with programs, local rules, technology, and leadership can help healthcare places reduce waste, improve food quality, and support healthier communities. Ongoing efforts will shape the future of healthcare and community well-being.
Sustainability is crucial in healthcare as it ensures that the needs of current and future populations are met while minimizing environmental impact. A healthy population relies on a healthy planet, especially for vulnerable groups affected by environmental inequities.
The University of Utah Health is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2040 and has signed the Health and Human Services Climate Pledge, which includes creating a climate resilience plan and inventorying supply chain emissions by 2024.
Improving energy efficiency reduces emissions, enhances local air quality, and fosters a more sustainable healthcare system. U of U Health has saved enough energy to power 2,617 homes annually since 2016.
U of U Health aims to divert as much waste as possible through improved purchasing, reprocessing, composting, and recycling to mitigate its environmental impact.
Sustainability in the operating room focuses on improving patient care, decreasing waste, and reducing harmful emissions. U of U Health aims to reduce anesthetic gas emissions by 50% by 2025.
U of U Health has committed to increasing sustainable food procurement from 7% to 20% by 2025 and implements practices to reduce food waste through initiatives like Lean Path and local donations.
Sustainable design principles are incorporated into new hospital and clinic constructions to meet current and future patient health needs, with facilities like the Area E and Craig Nielsen Rehab Hospital achieving LEED Silver certification.
U of U Health emphasizes reducing waste during procurement by evaluating product materials, origins, producers, disposal methods, and overall functionality to favor reusable over disposable items.
The organization is actively pursuing opportunities to convert grass areas to water-wise landscaping around hospitals and clinics to minimize water consumption.
Over 50% of the university’s electricity is derived from renewable sources, with a goal to increase this to 75% by 2025.
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