M.J. Kellner’s royal blue and golden yellow semi-trucks are a typical sight all through central Illinois. Each week, the wholesale meals firm delivers hundreds of kilos of grocery objects to state-owned services, together with prisons, psychological well being facilities, rehabilitation establishments and veterans houses. The corporate boasts that a lot of its prospects are inside a 100-mile radius of its Springfield headquarters.
However a lot of the meals M.J. Kellner delivers comes from nicely past state traces.
In actual fact, of all of the meals consumed in Illinois, 95% of it comes from outdoors the state.
The Good Meals Buying Program (GFPP), proposed throughout this yr’s Illinois Normal Meeting, would have required meals distributors like M.J. Kellner to offer extra details about how and the place they supply their meals.
Home Invoice B3701 and Senate Invoice 2187 would have considerably modified state meals procurement practices, which advocates say are outdated and divert tens of millions of public {dollars} out of state every year, as an alternative of going to native farmers. The payments would have additionally raised requirements for meals corporations’ labor, environmental and animal welfare practices.
Nonetheless, state lawmakers didn’t cross the payments earlier than a key legislative deadline in April.
“That’s what you name a missed alternative,” mentioned Sen. Willie Preston, D-Chicago, the Senate invoice’s sponsor.
State establishments buy and serve a whole lot of hundreds of meals each day, value tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in contracts. Advocates for the buying program need state businesses to ship extra public cash to small native producers and distributors, particularly those who present honest wages and protected working circumstances.
State businesses use dozens of personal meals distributors, however for the Division of Corrections, the state’s largest meals purchaser, practically 70% goes to simply two: M. J. Kellner and Superior Commodities, Inc. The overwhelming majority of these contracts, value greater than $156 million mixed since 2021, provide meals for the practically 30,000 folks incarcerated in Illinois.
M.J. Kellner didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Many of the corporations are wholesale distributors. They purchase giant meals portions from producers, usually at a big low cost, and promote them to establishments, eating places and different companies.
A number of state businesses opposed the invoice, together with the Illinois Division of Central Administration Providers, the company liable for most meals purchases.
CMS, the Division of Agriculture and different businesses testified towards the Good Meals Buying Program on the Home Agriculture Committee on March 18. Company officers mentioned on the listening to that the coverage would add extra purple tape to an already advanced course of.
State Rep. Sonya Harper, a Chicago Democrat and chair of the Home Agriculture and Conservation Committee, mentioned state officers had ample time to deal with points together with her and mustn’t have waited till the eleventh hour to lift objections.
“This invoice has been on the market,” mentioned Harper, who was a sponsor of the Home invoice. “When you had a problem with it, you guys know the way it goes. Ship me some language that will make it higher. Let’s have that dialog earlier than the day that I come to committee.”
With the payments lifeless, Harper filed a Home joint decision that, if handed, will lengthen the lifetime of the duty pressure and encourage, however not require, state businesses to share particulars about their meals buying practices.
Harvesting experience: Company logistics meets native meals
Clint Bland’s business natural household farm in central Illinois is only a 5-minute drive from Jacksonville Correctional Facility, one of many state’s 27 grownup prisons. He additionally raises beef and poultry, and started promoting to a number of native faculty districts round central Illinois in 2024 as a part of numerous native and federal applications that assist faculties purchase extra regionally produced meals.
However when requested if he’d ever considered making an attempt to promote his merchandise to Jacksonville Correctional Heart, Bland mentioned he didn’t know the place to begin.
“I don’t even know who to contact,” Bland mentioned. “It’s been laborious sufficient simply determining who the consumers are in sure faculties. It’s laborious to get a seat on the desk, you realize.”
Bland spent practically a decade working in higher administration for a significant company meals redistributor referred to as Dot Meals, a type of intermediary for the intermediary within the meals provide chain. The corporate buys truckloads of meals from producers after which sells smaller portions to smaller distributors.
In 2016, he and his spouse began farming in Jacksonville, and in 2022, he turned farming right into a full-time job. Impressed to strengthen the native meals scene in his space, Bland later began an aggregation and distribution firm for native producers referred to as Farmers Alliance for Regional Advertising and Gross sales, or The Farms of Illinois for brief.
“Farmers are sometimes not the most effective at customer support, they’re not the most effective at supply and invoicing and billing. They’re not the most effective in any respect this stuff,” Bland mentioned. “They simply need their palms within the soil.”
State businesses are required to award meals contracts to the bottom compliant bidder who additionally meets established specs. However in 2022, lawmakers allowed public faculties to rent distributors that supply native meals merchandise, even when the price was greater.
Going with simply the bottom bid pressured faculties to simply accept meals of substandard high quality, which resulted in rubbish cans filled with uneaten meals and in the end, wasted cash, advocates of the change mentioned.
In September 2023, Pawnee Group Unit College District No. 11 began shopping for and serving regionally grown greens and regionally raised beef and rooster.
State Rep. Wayne Rosenthal, R-Springfield, lately visited the varsity and mentioned that the price of buying native meals is usually the identical, if not cheaper, than the prior vendor.
“(There’s not) a lot distinction (in value) by hook or by crook,” Rosenthal mentioned. “The large distinction is the children are consuming the meals. They’re not throwing it away. And to me, that’s a giant plus.”
Native meals applications terminated: Farmers really feel left within the mud
Advocates for the native buying program say state assist is very necessary following the Trump administration’s cuts to 2 key federal applications: IL-EATS and the Resilient Meals Programs Infrastructure.
The IL-EATS program funneled $43 million in federal {dollars} final yr to the state well being division to contract with native farmers to produce meals banks. This system represented round 30% of all gross sales for The Farms of Illinois, however was lower by Trump in March. Since then, Bland has laid off an worker with the potential for extra cuts.
“All these farmers are relying on us, too,” he mentioned. “I’ve an incredible duty. I really feel super weight to ensure that I don’t fail them.”
Ed Dubrick, a small pasture poultry farmer in Cissna Park who additionally farms greens together with his spouse, mentioned native farmers battle to compete in a consolidated market the place giant distributors are capable of promote merchandise nicely beneath the value it takes to provide them.
“The (IL-EATS) program had actually hit its stride and was making a distinction within the lives of each farmers and the diet insecure in our state,” Dubrick mentioned.
The Resilient Meals Programs Infrastructure (RFSI) program offered federal funds for infrastructure, comparable to refrigerated vans, walk-in coolers, wash stations and business dehydrators and dry racks — essential instruments that assist farmers entry higher market alternatives.
The Trump administration eradicated the $6.5 million program in March.
Critics of Trump’s actions argue the cuts additionally contradict his push for U.S. farmers to promote extra of their merchandise domestically, significantly as an escalating commerce struggle threatens to disrupt the export market.
“Prepare to begin making numerous agricultural product to be bought INSIDE of the USA…Have enjoyable!” Trump lately posted on social media.
Jackie de Bautista, government director of Farmers Rising, a nonprofit agricultural schooling group, was livid when she learn the president’s publish in March.
“The ridiculousness of this assertion is that shifting a whole meals trade manufacturing system from row crops to native meals requires a transition interval,” de Bautista mentioned. “The irony in that assertion is that this work was already taking place and was lastly being supported and incentivized by our federal authorities (earlier than being abruptly lower).”
Bland nonetheless devotes a small portion of his farmland to commodity crops like corn and soybeans. So when the USDA pulled the plug on two applications that had helped him develop his native meals enterprise, he was stunned to discover a examine from the identical company in his mailbox.
This time, it was to compensate him for elevated fertilizer and pesticide prices and falling commodity costs.
For Bland, it made one factor apparent: the system nonetheless props up commodity agriculture, however not native meals.
He mentioned the priorities of the USDA are out of steadiness.
“Swiftly we acquired native meals going away, and the federal government saying that that’s not necessary,” Bland mentioned, “however costs acquired too low for you in your commodity, so we’re going to present you free cash.”
Elevating requirements: Coverage goals to raise labor requirements for all
The Good Meals Buying Program prioritizes 5 values: supporting native economies, honest labor circumstances and compensation, nutritious complete meals with minimal dangerous components, animal welfare requirements, and environmental sustainability by ecological sourcing and menu planning.
Full transparency could be important at each degree of the availability chain, advocates mentioned. Beneath the coverage, suppliers would ultimately be required to share sourcing knowledge — tracing merchandise from farm to plate — and make that knowledge public.
This system would prioritize corporations that pay their staff a “livable wage,” encouraging state businesses to grant contracts to corporations with greater scores.
For instance, Tyson Meals, which sells meat to M.J. Kellner, has repeatedly been cited for youngster labor violations, together with some tied to deadly incidents. Smithfield, one other M.J. Kellner provider and the world’s largest pork producer, has confronted a number of complaints that the corporate disproportionately exposes low-income, rural, navy, and Black communities to air and water air pollution from the corporate’s biogas operations.
This system would require full provide chain transparency from all suppliers, making middlemen like M.J. Kellner present the place their meals comes from, the way it will get from the farm to the plate, how a lot the corporate spent on it and at what amount.
This may be simpler mentioned than executed. A 2023 report produced by Meals Chain Staff Alliance and HEAL Meals Alliance, two coalitional teams consisting of staff and producers, revealed that after 10 years of comparable meals buying applications working in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, establishments had been solely capable of get hold of a sliver of their provide chain sourcing knowledge — and so they hardly ever shared this restricted info with the general public.
Prepare dinner County adopted the GFPP in 2018. In idea, county procurement decision-makers ought to look at working circumstances for meals warehouse staff.
However a 2023 survey discovered that greater than half of the meals chain staff within the Chicagoland space nonetheless earned wages too low to feed their households, and three-quarters lacked employer-provided well being care. Staff who spoke up about their rights had been fired or suspended.
Roger Cooley, government director of the Chicago Meals Coverage Motion Council, which crafted and advocated for the state invoice, mentioned that the purpose isn’t essentially to cancel or not renew contracts with present distributors in the event that they’re not doing a superb job, however to lift requirements when shortcomings are recognized.
And if a meals firm has OSHA violations, a state division can “return to that provider and be like, ‘Look, both you tackle these OSHA violations and provides us a transparent plan for it, or we’re going to need to shift our buying to any individual else,’” Cooley mentioned.
“It’s extra of a carrot than a stick methodology,” mentioned Cooley, referencing the truth that that is an incentive course of, not a mandate. “It is a lengthy course of. It’s not going to occur in a single day.”
State meals contracts: A previous supply of controversy in Illinois politics
Meals contracts have been a supply of controversy within the state’s political historical past.
In April 2002, whereas Rod Blagojevich was campaigning for governor, Archer Daniels Midland executives gifted the 46-year-old Democrat candidate two seats on one of many firm’s non-public jets. In October, they gave him use of a non-public aircraft. Each had been listed as marketing campaign donations on Secretary of State information.
After Blagojevich was elected, ADM executives continued to funnel cash into his committee. In 2005, the corporate was awarded a profitable contract to produce soy-based merchandise to the Division of Corrections.
By 2009, dozens of individuals incarcerated in state prisons filed lawsuits towards IDOC, alleging that soy was served in practically each cooked merchandise at each meal and was liable for making the plaintiffs sick with gastrointestinal points, allergic reactions, coronary heart issues, and thyroid dysfunction.
The lawsuits had been all dismissed.
In 2009, Blagojevich was impeached, faraway from workplace and sentenced to 14 years in federal jail on federal corruption prices for numerous pay-to-play schemes, none of which concerned ADM.
The corporate obtained practically $5 million from the state to offer soy merchandise from 2005 to 2013.
In 2019, IDOC dietary departments introduced they deliberate to maneuver away from soy-heavy menus, “which can lower your expenses on manufacturing and scale back lawsuits filed towards the division,” in line with a fiscal report that yr.
Because the former governor’s arrest, Illinois’ procurement regulation has gone by a collection of fine-tuning efforts to root out corruption and conflicts of curiosity, together with a 2008 invoice Blagojevich himself signed into regulation, prohibiting public officers from accepting contributions from contractors. Earlier than it handed, his marketing campaign committee collected between $50,000 and $100,000 from corporations searching for state contracts in a blitz of fundraising.
In 2021, the Illinois Division of Corrections started buying commissary objects in a extra centralized means, which led to disruptions within the supply of products.
Commissary objects are a essential lifeline for incarcerated individuals who don’t need to, or can’t, eat the meals.
In line with a 2022 survey of individuals incarcerated at Illinois Division of Corrections services, 70% of respondents indicated that they relied on buying commissary objects to complement no less than half of all of their meals.
One respondent commented, “Nobody likes the meals in jail. A few of these folks have been locked up for 20 years or extra. They by no means eat the state meals.”
Gwyn Troyer, Affiliate Director from the John Howard Affiliation, the not-for-profit jail watchdog group that performed the survey, mentioned that meals is an missed want in a system beleaguered with challenges like delayed upkeep, lockdowns, and medical and psychological healthcare points.
“There isn’t any public accounting of how state funds are spent,” Troyer mentioned, “or experience offered concerning how Illinois would possibly higher spend money on meals in prisons to advertise well being and wellbeing.”
She mentioned the group requires larger transparency and oversight concerning state spending for meals in prisons.
Troyer mentioned that the issues she hears principally relate to meals parts, insufficient diet, significantly associated to medical and spiritual diets.
The Illinois Division of Corrections spent over $56 million on meals in 2024, in line with an Examine Midwest evaluation of publicly obtainable knowledge, a 70% improve from 2021 to 2024.
A spokesperson for IDOC mentioned in a written assertion that the rise is because of inflation and enhancements to meals, which embrace bigger servings of contemporary produce, complete muscle meat, and “revised meals” at Grownup Transition Facilities. An evaluation of state information present that DOC spending on MJ Kellner contracts has elevated greater than tenfold since 2021, making up a major share of DOC contracts general.
“Because the 2022 survey,” the spokesperson wrote, “IDOC has added a Registered Dietitian to its staff,” whose position is to enhance the general high quality of meals.
The spokesperson mentioned that the division’s grasp menu is being up to date to emphasise diet, product availability, and normal preferences.
Politics, procurement and value tags: What killed the meals reform invoice
The Good Meals Buying Program not solely stalled this yr in committee, it lacked clear assist from present Gov. JB Pritzker, who faces difficult price range constraints amid federal funding cuts.
When requested if he would assist the invoice at a farm occasion in Urbana, Pritzker mentioned that with the state going through losses of roughly $11 billion as a result of federal cuts, there’s a lot pulling on the state price range.
“In a world the place we’ve acquired to fret about preserving our rural hospitals open once we lose what I feel we might in Medicaid, it’s going to be triage,” he mentioned. “One thing goes to shut.”
Cooley, of the Chicago Meals Coverage Motion Council, doesn’t consider that the proposed program would increase prices.
“Now we have seen again and again, it doesn’t matter what the yr is, these price range issues come up and are given as one of many fundamental causes for not shifting ahead on this coverage,” Cooley mentioned. “Oftentimes, departments and businesses really feel like they’re beneath the gun, underfunded, and under-resourced, and including something new is a stretch for them.”
Scratch cooking, tools upgrades and selecting native, seasonal components can hold budgets down, Cooley added. College kitchens in Chicago and Pawnee conduct style assessments to determine what the scholars’ preferences are, decreasing waste. Past Inexperienced, a Chicago-based firm, helps practice institutional workers on the best way to prepare dinner giant portions from scratch with out growing prices.
The corporate even weighs the parts earlier than it’s served to college students and weighs the trash afterwards to see how a lot is thrown away.
“They’re tremendous dialing it in,” Bland mentioned.
A consultant from the Illinois Division of Agriculture, which opposed the invoice, testified at a March listening to that his company doesn’t have the technical know-how to manage a proper meals procurement course of, and that the invoice would considerably delay meals procurement at state-operated services.
Tyler Bohannon, the legislative liaison for the Illinois Division of Agriculture, mentioned that his division opposes the invoice as a result of his company doesn’t have the technical know-how to manage a proper meals procurement course of, and it may considerably delay ordering meals.
“Lastly,” he mentioned on the listening to, “the Division of Agriculture can’t assist any proposal that will have a considerable fiscal influence on the FY 26 price range.”
Ron Wilson, deputy director of Central Administration Providers and head of the Bureau of Strategic Sourcing, mentioned on the March 18 listening to that the invoice did not account for the extra purple tape it could create.
“The opposition that CMS has to this invoice has nothing to do with the contemporary meals. Everyone, I feel, is on board with that’s the best way to go. If we may try this, that will be improbable,” Wilson mentioned. “The problem the CMS presently has is the procurement side of this.”
In a written assertion to Examine Midwest, a spokesperson from CMS mentioned that centralized buying has been the state’s strategy since no less than 2004.
“That is normal observe throughout most large-scale governmental models and is taken into account a greatest observe because it takes benefit of economies of scale and considerably reduces redundant work necessities,” the assertion mentioned.
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