Take Five: Buying Low Carbon Food Services

Meena Venkatraman:  Hello and welcome to Take Five, a series of quick lessons in sustainable purchasing.  I'm Meena Venkatraman of Berkeley Lab, and today I'll cover how you can get food services that save energy and money. 

Since the U.S. government is the nation's largest energy consumer, federal agencies can unlock cost and carbon savings through buying energy efficient products and services. 

Only a handful of product types are responsible for most of this energy use—including the stuff you use for food services. 

Just think about refrigerators, they're everywhere—from home kitchen or break room fridges, commercial fridges in offices, to lab-grade fridges, which can use as much energy per day as an average U.S. household. That adds up to a lot of appliances across the tens of thousands of federal buildings. 

So, let's break down how to quickly and easily make sure your cafes, kitchens and labs are stocked with energy efficient appliances.

First, why do we care about the energy efficient part? Typical food service appliances are covered under energy efficient purchasing requirements. These requirements are written into federal law and have an associated FAR clause. They apply to both products and services. 

That means even if someone else is purchasing food service appliances on behalf of the federal government, such as in a service contract, these rules still apply. 

Federal agencies can also save on energy, costs and carbs—I mean, carbon emissions—by complying with these requirements.

So what are the requirements exactly? When you're procuring food services, the energy-using appliances that come with it need to be either ENERGY STAR certified or meet the FEMP-designated efficiency level. 

These two programs cover different products, sizes and capacities. For food service equipment, only commercial ice makers are covered under FEMP, and the rest of the products, including cooking appliances, food storage and dishwashers, are covered under ENERGY STAR.

How do you procure food services that meet these requirements? To give an example, let's say we're getting cafeteria services for a new building. 

First, let's head over to the Sustainable Facilities Tool, or SFTool.gov, provided by the General Services Administration (GSA). SFTool is your one-stop shop for sustainable procurement.

If you're not sure where to start and want to check what the relevant energy-using products are, use SFTool's virtual facility, found by visiting the Explore page. We're just focusing on energy related products today, such as cold food storage over here, but the virtual facility also lets you explore other products and sustainability requirements, like disposable plates or healthy cleaning equipment.

Going back to energy, if you're looking for solicitation guidance that will get you energy efficient products, you can go to this SFTool Procure page, and click Cafeteria and Food Services. 

There's a lot of information here, but let's focus on the downloadable resources and selected past solicitations. Now you might already have some draft language for your solicitation, just make sure you also include the following language to help you comply. 

First looking at the sample solicitation/contract language, you should include something like this language specifying the FEMP and ENERGY STAR programs in addition to other sustainable purchasing requirements.

It's good practice to highlight not only the requirements, but also how you'll verify them. Back on the overview page, we can see an example of this in the National Science Foundation Cafe/Bistro Services solicitation. This language here specifies actions that might be taken if the contractor does not follow sound energy conservation principles. 

And following these principles should definitely be a part of the evaluation criteria. As we see later in the same National Science Foundation solicitation, energy conservation is specified under Sustainability as an evaluation factor.

Ok so let's say the solicitation is awarded, and you've got all this equipment for your cafe. Now you can easily check for compliance by looking for the ENERGY STAR logo on the product, since pretty much all of these appliances are covered by ENERGY STAR. 

These steps that we've taken to comply with the efficient purchasing requirements can also apply for other services that use energy-consuming products, like construction services or electronic equipment leases. 

Apart from the energy consuming appliances we covered today, cafes and kitchens are also going to need cleaning—check out this short training on custodial services and healthy cleaning module from GSA to get help with procuring those services. 

You might also consider heating and cooling as well as lighting if the cafe is in a new space—for this we have other Take Five videos on buying air-source heat pumps and buying energy efficient lighting. And if you're ever unsure where to start, just remember S-F Tool is your friend for all things sustainable purchasing. 

Thanks for tuning in to this edition of Take Five, and thank you for doing your part to meet federal law, save taxpayer dollars, and address climate change.