In Nipissing, Parry Sound and Muskoka, schools have the option of purchasing from Distributors and getting their order delivered to their school door. The Distributors have food, cleaning and paper products for the school to choose from that have been vetted and negotiated through our Food and Logistics Purchasing Agent to meet the needs of the Student Nutrition Programs.
We have 67 Programs that have opted into the Distributing Program and some order weekly, some order biweekly or monthly through various Distributors.
We have developed good relationships with all of our Local Distributors through time and the result of these relationships have proven to be beneficial for both the Programs and the Distributors.
The minimum orders for the Distributors range from $100.00 for local deliveries to $500.00 for off route locations.
We meet with the Distributors every summer to discuss the order guide content, pricing and find ways of improving or expanding service.
We have two major Distributors for our region. One that covers the Nipissing Parry Sound Districts and the other covers the Muskoka District. Both major Distributors have agreed to accept the Breakfast Club of Canada yogurt and applesauce donations and deliver them to the schools at no charge to the programs. In some cases, they will deliver to schools that do not order from them.
If there are any quality or delivery issues, they are resolved quickly and credit is given back to the school promptly.
The advantage of having a local Distributor is that they do as much as they can to satisfy the school’s needs whenever they can. They have added an extra delivery day to their schedule with short notice to accommodate late orders or school holidays. They have done donation drives for the Student Nutrition program and donated back to the programs. They have also given OHL hockey game tickets to the schools to give out to students or to raffle off to raise money for the programs.
We have recently introduced a new web-based ordering platform to the schools that the programs found easy to learn and use that includes pictures of the products they are ordering and totals up their order. It also automatically sends an email when their order is submitted and saves all of their order history under their account so they can go back and review their orders at any time.
We would like to thank the following Distributors for being a local partner to get Good Food into Hungry Tummies!
Harvest King Foodservice, Avron Distributing, Smith Dairy, Vaughan Paper, Binx/Q2 Distributing, and Glendon & Danotti Quality Products Limited.