The Sacramento City Unified School District has faced harsh criticism after buying tens of thousands of dollars in canned peaches, pears and apple sauce from China. This action defied a federal guideline that asks U.S. schools to serve domestic food and running counter to the district’s embrace of the local farm-to-fork movement.
The large purchase drew criticism this month from the California Canning Peach Association and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove, whose Northern California congressional district includes 40 percent of California’s peach growers.
It also caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which said it will work with the district “to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used to purchase American products” in accordance with the Buy American provision of the National School Lunch Act. The act requires school districts to buy domestically grown and processed foods unless such items are not available domestically or cost significantly more than foreign supplies.
Sacramento City Unified spokesman Gabe Ross said in an interview last week that the purchase was a “mistake” and that the district halted future deliveries of canned foods from China.
Ross said the district is confident in the safety of the canned fruit. But, he said, the purchase was “inconsistent with our priorities and our goal to buy local products in the Sacramento region and California. We’ve got a great track record in the region with locally sourced foods.”
A letter from the peach association protesting the imported fruit came the same week. District board members were notified last week, Ross said.
Ross noted that the district’s request to contractors specified that the fruits would be produced domestically. But by the end, the deal morphed into one for canned fruits from China. Gold Star Foods won a contract worth more than $300,000 to provide a range of fruits and one vegetable for the 2015-16 school year. Most of the cost was for the peaches, pears and applesauce.
According to prices in the Gold Star bid, the district agreed to pay $110,058 for 3,900 cases of diced peaches in extra light syrup for the school year. The California-grown product, in contrast, would have cost $152,763 for the same volume, about 39 percent more expensive.
The 500 cases of sliced Bartlett pears from China cost $13,000 compared to the $19,300 bid for the California product. And 2,700 cases of applesauce cost $52,191 from China instead of $62,856 from Washington state.
Last week, the district said it had halted outstanding orders for the products from China. By then, the district had ordered 728 cases of canned peaches, 952 cases of pears and 896 cases of applesauce.
