Healthy Food Pledge

In healthcare facilities across the country there is a growing awareness that our food system is misaligned with U.S. dietary guidelines. Behind these nutritional imbalances is a food system largely reliant on methods of production and distribution that negatively impact public and environmental health.

The Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge is a framework that outlines steps to be taken by the health care industry to improve the health of patients, communities, and the environment.

Hundreds of hospitals across the United States have signed the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge to demonstrate their commitment to "first, do no harm” and treat food and its production and distribution as preventive medicine.

By signing the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge, facilities are demonstrating leadership and sending an important signal to the marketplace about their interest in local, nutritious, sustainable food and modeling healthy food practices for patients, staff, and visitors.

Sign on to the Healthy Food
in Health Care Pledge here

The Healthy Food in Healthcare Pledge

We pledge to:

• Work with local farmers, community-based organizations and food suppliers to increase the availability of locally-sourced food.
• Encourage our vendors and/or food management companies to supply us with food that is, among other attributes, produced without synthetic pesticides and hormones or antibiotics given to animals in the absence of diagnosed disease and which supports farmer health and welfare, and ecologically protective and restorative agriculture.
• Increase our offering of fruit and vegetables, nutritionally-dense and minimally processed, unrefined foods and reduce unhealthy (trans and saturated) fats and sweetened foods.
• Implement a stepwise program to identify and adopt sustainable food procurement. Begin where fewer barriers exist and immediate steps can be taken. For example, the adoption of rBGH free milk, fair trade coffee, or introduction of organic fresh produce in the cafeteria.
• Communicate to our Group Purchasing Organizations our interest in foods that are identified as local and/or third-party certified.
• Educate and communicate within our system and to our patients and community about our nutritious, socially just and ecological sustainable food healthy food practices and procedures.
• Minimize or beneficially reuse food waste and support the use of food packaging and products which are ecologically protective.
• Develop a program to promote and source from producers and processors which uphold the dignity of family, farmers, workers and their communities and support sustainable and humane agriculture systems.
• Report annually on implementation of this Pledge.

View the current list of Pledge-signing hospitals.