Case Study for Supply Chain Resilience for Food Contracts

The Education Authority's (EA) vision is to inspire, support and challenge all our young people to be the best that they can be. Our mission, to provide a high-quality education for every child. EA's Catering Service is an essential part of helping our young people achieve their educational goals by providing them with a nutritious meal at lunchtime. Empirical evidence demonstrates nutrition is a key factor influencing behaviour, emotions, mental health, and academic achievement through increased attention levels for longer periods of time. The EA Catering Service produce and serve approximately 140,000 meals per day.

The Global pandemic, the UK’s exit from Europe (Brexit) and more recently the Ukraine War have resulted in supply chain challenges. EA’s Procurement Catering Category have worked closely with our key food suppliers over the last three years to ensure supply chain resilience in relation to the critical food products. The objective to understand our food commodity supply chains, supply markets, and global supply issues and to ensure a consistent supply chain that enabled the continuous uninterrupted delivery of nutritious meals to our children and young people.

The NI Executives draft Programme of Government (PfG) commitments are utmost in the EA’s Commercial Procurement Services (CPS) strategy when establishing food contracts, specifically the following PfG commitments: -

• Our children and young people have the best start in life
• We all enjoy long, healthy active life
• Everyone can reach their potential

The exit from the EU presented challenges to suppliers as they navigated the new requirements for importing into Northern Ireland, particularly relevant to food products from GB and Europe directly into Northern Ireland. EA CPS worked closely with their key food suppliers to understand and manage their supply chain in relation to EA’s critical food items.

Initially this involved embarking on regular surveys of our suppliers to identify issues early and enable EA to triage contracts and target resource to areas of risk and develop timely mitigations. The findings of these surveys assisted the EA in triaging key contracts with supply risks.
For those key contracts identified following the action and mitigations were put in place:

• Established steering groups within key stakeholders to assess the potential impacts of Brexit; to assess the possible outcomes and measures needed to mitigate impacts of Brexit and ensure EA had uninterrupted access to critical food products needed for the Catering Service.
• Worked directly with our suppliers to ensure ongoing engagement across the entire supply chain to identify potential delays in receiving stock and to mitigate were possible.
• Established a working group comprises EA’s Commercial Procurement Services Catering Category and EAs Catering Service to identify the critical food products required for school menus and increase their stockholding accordingly.
• Transferred supply routes to local supply chains were appropriate including transferring supply from GB to NI and RoI to reduce lead times and supply chain

EA has delivered supply chain resilience and social value by ensuring this is an integral element of our procurement strategies e.g. Supply and Delivery Fresh Milk, value £13m contract over 4 years and Supply and Delivery of Fresh Beef Lamb and Pork, value £12m over 4.5 years.

• For each of the contracts above extensive Pre-Market Engagement (PME) was carried with suppliers to understand the local supply chains and markets and ensure our tenders are designed to ensure effective supply chain resilience and social value.
• Lotting strategies developed included these being based on NI geographic areas to appeal to the local supply market and encourage SMEs shorten the supply chain.
• These strategies have resulted in the award of the majority of contracts to a local supply base: 100% of the Milk and Milk Products procured for use in school meals kitchens are sourced from Northern Ireland, and 95% of the Fresh Meat products procured for use in school meals kitchens are sourced from NI and RoI.

The outcome of EAs approach has been to shorten the supply chain, increase the use of local produced products, supporting our SME market and shorten the logistics timescale and distance thus delivering social value, sustainability, and value for money.

Although there have been significant supply chain challenges EA have been able to manage the challenges successfully by mapping our supply chain and engaging with our suppliers to ensure early identification of any supply chain risks; this in turn has allowed EA to mitigate identified risks and ensure our children and young people receive a nutritious meal each school day. Our procurement systems and processes directly contribute to the EAs strategic objectives, the PfG and delivery of the requirements of PPN 03/21 Supply Chain Resilience.