4/13/03 by Adriane Dellorco

After Oberlin signed on with Bon Appetit in Fall 2001, Bon Appetit was bought out by the Compass Group, the largest food service provider in the world. The Compass Group has a lot of buying power, so they get discounts for purchasing food from a select group of distributors. A. Lo. Prestis is one of those distributors. Although Oberlin CDS managers were perfectly satisfied purchasing from Premier Produce inCleveland, they were required to buy from A. Lo. Prestis again.

None of the managers wanted to switch back to A. Lo. Prestis for a number of reasons: 1)Quality was not as high as Premier's produce, 2)A. Lo. Prestis could not provide the local and organic produce that Premier did, and 3)A. Lo. Prestis was generally less reliable and accommodating than Premier. The managers were required to try A. Lo. Prestis again for a few weeks. The managers kept track of all the things that went wrong with A. Lo. Prestis so that they could petition Bon Appetit to let them keep Premier produce.

Nevertheless, it was decided that CDS would purchase from A. Lo. Prestis instead of Premier. Concerned about the impact that buying from A. Lo. Prestis would mean for local purchasing, a meeting was held with Jack Cahill (Bon Appetit), Michele Gross (Oberlin College ResLife), Brad Masi (OSAP), and Adriane Dellorco (CDS Recycler) to discuss the matter. We came up with a plan that CDS would only purchase local food from Premier, giving back business to Premier and securing the future of local foods purchasing. The accounting for local foods purchasing would therefore be much more simple because in the future we can be sure that everything coming from Premier will be local.