The Problem on Our Plates
A visit to nearly any university dining hall reveals a familiar pattern: sugary drinks outnumber water, fried options anchor the hot food stations, and the healthiest items often cost more and sell out first. This is a structural problem rather than a failure of individual willpower, and universities are in a strong position to fix it.
Nationally, 44% of college students are overweight or obese,1 over 60% consume sugary drinks daily, and only 19% eat adequate fruits or vegetables.2 Poor diet quality at this life stage is associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mental health disorders including anxiety and depression.3 4 What students have access to on campus plays an important role in their eating habits, often beyond what nutrition education alone can change.
Analysis of 1.5 million food transactions at campus dining venues reveals that students consistently select nutritionally poor options when healthier foods are limited—with lower-income students and male students making the least healthy choices.5 Food insecurity compounds this inequity: for instance, a study showed that 17% of Harvard graduate students and 13% of postdoctoral trainees report food insecurity.6 For these community members, when most campus food options are expensive and high in calories, eating well becomes more difficult, especially for those with limited budgets.
Why Past Efforts Have Fallen Short
A landmark study at the Harvard School of Public Health cafeteria found that subsidizing healthy foods by 20%, combined with educational materials, increased healthy food purchases by 6%—with improvements sustained even after prices returned to baseline.7 Other initiatives, such as the Menus of Change program8 and time-limited campus health messaging campaigns, take different approaches to promoting healthier food service on campus.
While these efforts are valuable, they remain insufficient for systemic change because they are often small-scale, temporary, and do not address the procurement and food service contracts that shape the foods available on university campuses. A national review of university food service contracts found largely absent or inconsistent nutrition requirements, representing a significant gap between institutional health goals and procurement practice.9 Because there is no federal policy that mandates nutrition standards in higher education food services, the nutritional quality of campus food options can vary widely across institutions. Assessments using the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey (NEMS) consistently find that campus food environments fail to meet basic nutritional criteria across institution types and regions. Without clear policies, awareness campaigns alone are unlikely to address the problem.
Embedding Health into Mandatory Standards
The solution lies in embedding enforceable nutrition standards into the university contracts with food service providers. Rather than relying on marketing campaigns to encourage healthier choices, a campus-wide nutrition procurement policy would require all food vendors to meet defined nutrition, pricing, and availability standards. These requirements would apply across university-run dining services and third-party operators, helping ensure that healthier and affordable options are available throughout campus.
To make this happen, four components would need to work in tandem. Mandatory nutrition standards adopted by each university and applied through its food service contracts, would require that at least 70% of beverages be water, unsweetened drinks, or low-fat milk;10 that daily menus include at least two fruit and three vegetable servings;11,12 that at least half of grain offerings be whole grains; and that sodium be capped at 800mg per entree.13 Deep-frying would be prohibited.14Lean protein entrees must meet USDA standards,15 with plant-based protein options offered daily and seafood options available at least twice per week.16
Pricing requirements would mandate that healthy options be priced within 10% of comparable unhealthy alternatives, with at least three healthy value meals available under $10 and water always the cheapest beverage option. Institutional dining services would provide subsidies to vendors where necessary to offset compliance costs—directly targeting economic barriers that disproportionately affect lower-income students and staff.
Availability standards would ensure that compliant healthy options are stocked and accessible throughout all operating hours across all venues. This prevents the common pattern where healthy options are offered in theory but sell out by mid-morning or are unavailable at certain locations.
Quarterly compliance monitoring and public reporting would require institutions to conduct regular audits using point-of-sale data and site visits, with results published publicly. A community feedback mechanism would allow students and staff to report violations. Noncompliance would trigger corrective action plans and, if unresolved, contract termination.
Why This Approach Works
Research suggests that food labeling and other changes to the food environment can influence purchasing behavior.17,18 For example, traffic-light labeling has been shown to shift purchases toward healthier items.19 What makes contract-based procurement policy distinctive is that it brings these approaches together through enforceable requirements in university food service contracts.
Two complementary theories help explain why. Social Cognitive Theory suggests that when healthy options are reliably available and affordable, people feel more confident about choosing them and more convinced the choice is worthwhile.20 Social Ecological Theory locates that dynamic within a broader system: peer norms, campus environments, and institutional policy shape behavior in ways that cascade from the top down.21 By intervening at the institutional level—through vendor contracts—this policy reshapes the environment that individual choices are made within, something education-only approaches, however well-designed, cannot do alone.
This is also a matter of institutional coherence. Universities regularly cite community well-being as a core institutional value. Yet food procurement practices—the actual contracts that determine what tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff can eat on campus—have not been consistently aligned with that value in a systematic, enforceable way. A unified procurement policy would close that gap.
Addressing the Objections
The most common concern skeptics have with this approach is feasibility: can institutions enforce these standards across dozens of third-party vendors with diverse operational models? The Good Food Purchasing Program’s experience in cities suggests yes—the leverage of contract renewal is significant, and graduated enforcement mechanisms give vendors a realistic path to compliance before facing termination.
A second objection concerns cost. Healthy ingredients often carry higher wholesale prices, and pricing mandates could squeeze vendor margins. The policy addresses this directly through targeted institutional subsidies and by giving vendors a 6-month rollout period before full implementation. This is not a cost-free policy, but the investment is justified: improved diet quality reduces healthcare costs, supports academic performance, and advances the institutional mission in measurable ways.
The final concern is scope. The policy only governs on-campus eating, and in my experience, many students—particularly graduate students and commuters—primarily eat elsewhere. This is a real limitation, but it is an argument for complementing the policy with other interventions, not against the policy itself. Improving the food environment where institutions have direct contractual control is a meaningful step even if it cannot solve the entire problem.
Equity at the Center
The policy is designed to be equity-conscious. By mandating price parity and ensuring availability across all campus locations—not just high-traffic or higher-income areas—it directly addresses documented disparities in campus food access. Evaluation plans would track outcomes by vendor type, location, and population served, allowing institutions to identify and correct disparities in implementation.
This granularity matters. Without data disaggregated by location and population served, equity commitments risk becoming aspirational rather than operational. If certain locations or groups show weaker improvements, the data will flag where targeted corrective support—additional subsidies, vendor technical assistance, or contract renegotiation—is needed. For institutions serving significant proportions of first-generation, low-income, or international students, this is not a secondary consideration but a central one.
A Scalable Model for Higher Education
The scalability of this model extends well beyond any single campus. The procurement framework—standardized nutrition criteria, contract-based enforcement, periodic auditing, public reporting—is transferable to any university with food service contracts. The audit protocols and vendor compliance documentation could be made available to peer institutions seeking to improve their own food environments. Well-documented implementations at leading research universities could function as proof of concept and practical template simultaneously.
Healthy eating should not require extraordinary effort, extra expense, or a perfectly timed visit. Universities that regularly claim community well-being as a core value have an opportunity and an obligation to align their food procurement practices with that claim. A unified, enforceable nutrition procurement policy offers a clear, equitable path to doing so. The tools exist. The evidence is sufficient. What remains is the institutional will to act.
1 Ellison-Barnes, A., et al. “Trends in Obesity Prevalence among Adults Aged 18 through 25 Years, 1976–2018.” JAMA 324, no. 6 (2020): 603–616.
2 American College Health Association. National College Health Assessment (NCHA) Spring 2025 Survey Reports. Silver Spring, MD: American College Health Association, 2025.https://www.acha.org/wp-content/uploads/NCHA-IIIb_SPRING_2025_REFERENCE_GROUP_INSTITUTIONAL_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf.
3 Mambrini, S. P., et al. “Ultra-Processed Food Consumption and Incidence of Obesity and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors in Adults: A Systematic Review of Prospective Studies.” Nutrients 15, no. 11 (2023): 2583.
4 Dimopoulou, M., A. Dimopoulou, and O. Gortzi. “Dietary Patterns and Mental Health across the Lifespan: A Systematic Review of Randomized Clinical Trials.” Psychology International 7, no. 4 (2025): 87. https://doi.org/10.3390/psycholint7040087.
5 Racine, E. F., et al. “A College Fast-Food Environment and Student Food and Beverage Choices.” Nutrients 14, no. 8 (2022): 1678.
6 Hammad, N. M., and C. W. Leung. “Food Insecurity among Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Trainees.” JAMA 331, no. 5 (2024): 456–467.
7 Michels, K., B. R. Bloom, P. Riccardi, B. A. Rosner, and W. C. Willett. “A Study of the Importance of Education and Cost Incentives on Individual Food Choices at the Harvard School of Public Health Cafeteria.” Journal of the American College of Nutrition 27, no. 1 (2008): 6–11.
8 Menus of Change: The Business of Healthy, Sustainable, Delicious Food Choices.” Accessed March 4, 2026. https://www.menusofchange.org
9 Fandetti, S. M., A. A. Dahl, C. Webster, M. B. Bably, M. J. Coffman, and E. F. Racine. “Healthy Food Policies Documented in University Food Service Contracts.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 20, no. 16 (2023): 6617.
10 Malik, V. S., and F. B. Hu. “The Role of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages in the Global Epidemics of Obesity and Chronic Diseases.” Nature Reviews Endocrinology 18, no. 4 (2022): 205–218. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-021-00627-6.
11 U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020–2025. 9th ed. Washington, DC: USDA/HHS, 2020.https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans_2020-2025.pdf.
12Wang, D. D., Y. Li, S. N. Bhupathiraju, B. A. Rosner, Q. Sun, E. L. Giovannucci, et al. “Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Mortality: Results from 2 Prospective Cohort Studies of US Men and Women and a Meta-Analysis of 26 Cohort Studies.” Circulation 143, no. 17 (2021): 1642–1654. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.048996
13 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Sodium Reduction: State Policy Interventions by Evidence Level.” Atlanta, GA: CDC. Accessed December 17, 2025. https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/dhdsp/policy_resources/sodium/evidence_interventions.htm.
14 Qin, P., M. Zhang, M. Han, D. Liu, X. Luo, L. Xu, et al. “Fried-Food Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies.” Heart 107, no. 19 (2021): 1567–1575. https://doi.org/10.1136/heartjnl-2020-317883.
15 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. Meats/Meat Alternates. Washington, DC: USDA. Accessed December 17, 2025. https://foodbuyingguide.fns.usda.gov/Content/TablesFBG/USDA_FBG_Section1_MeatsAndMeatAlternates.pdf.
16 American Heart Association. “Fish and Omega-3 Fatty Acids.” Accessed December 17, 2025. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/fish-and-omega-3-fatty-acids.
17 Li, X., A. Braakhuis, Z. Li, and R. Roy. “How Does the University Food Environment Impact Student Dietary Behaviors? A Systematic Review.” Frontiers in Nutrition 9 (2022): 840818.
18 Roy, R., B. Kelly, A. Rangan, and M. Allman-Farinelli. “Food Environment Interventions to Improve the Dietary Behavior of Young Adults in Tertiary Education Settings: A Systematic Literature Review.” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 115, no. 10 (2015): 1647–1681. https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(15)01114-4/abstract.
19 Calabro, R., E. Kemps, I. Prichard, and M. Tiggemann. “Healthy Vending Machines on Campus: The Effect of Traffic Light Labelling on Food and Beverage Choices.” Public Health Nutrition, March 17, 2025. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/healthy-vending-machines-on-campus-the-effect-of-traffic-light-labelling-on-food-and-beverage-choices/30AFD809E9003DD2A3FCA588EE469374.
20 Nickerson, C. “Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory.” Simply Psychology, September 17, 2026. https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-cognitive-theory.html.
21 Golden, S. D., and J. A. Earp. “Social Ecological Approaches to Individuals and Their Contexts: Twenty Years of Health Education & Behavior Health Promotion Interventions.” Health Education & Behavior 39 (2012): 364–372. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198111418634