Articles
The College Food Project: Meal Costs
Locally grown food purchased directly from farmers: How do the prices compare?
Residence halls with debit card or à la carte payment plans, where students pay separately for each food item, can sometimes pass on higher food costs to their students. Schools with a pre-paid board plan cannot recover costs above a certain predetermined level. For such schools, price can be a critical issue in local food buying efforts.
Many campus food service personnel assume that local, sustainable food costs more than food purchased through conventional channels. But this is not always true. We looked at the prices of some of the new farm-direct and organic items being sold on campus at UW-Madison to see how they compared to similar items sold by the food service. Here's what we learned:
The natural burgers are more expensive ...
Natural 100% beef burger, made from Wisconsin pasture-fed cattle that
were fed no animal byproducts, growth hormones, or antibiotics:
Meat cost per burger—$.75
versus Empak frozen burger, with many additives including hydrogenated
oils:
Meat cost per burger—$.43
The low-spray apples are cheaper ...
Environmentally-friendly apples, grown on an orchard in Dane County (where
Madison is located) using low-spray, IPM practices:
40# case, 100 count—$18.00 (Cortland variety)
versus Sysco apples—varieties range from $18.48 to $34.63 per 40# case (Cortland cost $22.62 per case)
The organic corn chips are cheaper than Doritos ...
At the campus convenience stores, the retail cost of Blue Farm organic blue corn chips, grown one county away from the University, is $1.91 for 10 ounces—$.19 per ounce
versus the retail cost of Doritos, which cost $3.04 for a 13 and 1/2 ounce bag—$.23 per ounce