We apologies there hasn’t been a lot content on this blog lately! Everyone has been busy with the midterms, presentation, and etc. But rest assure! Our project is coming along nicely!

On November 5, our group representatives, Seb and Weber, met again with our community partner from UBC food service. Our SEEDS project coordinator was also there, and she showed us a food procurement project done by LFS students from 4 years ago. It was a well done project by our predecessors. Their food procurement guideline is concise, organized, and educational. Although some of the information is out of dated, we can definitely learn from its structure and apply our knowledge to it and forge a modern version food procurement guideline for the Canadian Summer Olympic Games.

At the meeting, two key concerns for the guideline was brought up by the UBC food service community partner. First concern is the flexibility in the approval standard of our guideline. “Do we want set the standard so high that no one wish to apply? or do we want some flexibility with the guideline?” We decided that we shall be incorporate a point system for the food vender’s manual in order to address this concern. For every category of food, a rating of best, good, and avoid will be given to food in that category. 1 point for best, 0 point for good, and -1 point for avoid. Every food category used in the food manual need to have at least a positive score for it to be approved. This way, we are giving flexibility to the food venders, but also retaining high quality standard for the food manual at the event. Second concern is how we are rating these food standard. Since UBC is hosting this event, our community partner hope to achieve at least the food standard already in place on UBC campus, such as third party certification, free trade, ocean wide food standard, and etc. Our group project will definitely reflect their concern, and we will set the UBC food standard as the basis of our food procurement guideline for the 2014 Summer Canadian Olympic Games.