looking to jump into the guidebook? start here. Take the short quiz
School Meal Operator
Are you responsible for preparing and serving meals to students?
Agricultural Producer
Are you involved in the process of growing, raising, making, or distributing food?
School & Community Member
Are you a student, teacher, parent, community member or similar?
Show Me Everything
Welcome to the Colorado Local Food Program Guidebook.
This Guidebook is a navigation tool to discover more about the Local Food Program (LFP), gain valuable insights, and find the necessary information to get involved or to expand your farm to school programming.
The Local Food Program (LFP) offers selected School Food Authorities (SFAs) a reimbursement for the purchase of Colorado grown, raised, or processed products. LFP encourages SFAs to procure local products, foster nutrition education, bolster farm to child nutrition activities, and support Colorado producers and farmers.
Whether you are a buyer of local foods or seller of Colorado grown, raised, or processed products– or you simply have an interest in the Local Food Program in Colorado, this Guidebook is for you.
You can use the Guidebook by taking the short quiz above. This quiz will look for you to answer the Role you fall under, or the Role you are interested in learning more about, and then the Action you are looking to take:
- School Meal Operator
- Buying Local Foods
- Preparing Local Foods
- Promoting Local School Meals
- Agricultural Producer
- Understanding School Market Channels
- Selling to Schools
- Promoting Local Foods
- School and Community Member
- Insights into School Meal Programs
- Engaging with School Meal Programs
From there, you will land on our main resources page and depending on your answers to the quiz, the resources will be populated that relate to the Role and Action you selected. You can then select whichever resource interests you to learn more.
Another fun feature of The Guidebook is that you can also search via tags. In the filter panel, there is an assortment of tags and every resource has those tags attached to them. You can select one (or multiple) tags to find the resources that directly relate. You can also narrow in your search criteria by selecting the Audience, the Action, and then a tag – however, that may really narrow your results. Whatever you choose to do, ensure you reset the filters when starting a new search if you aren’t finding what you need. Or visit our Table of Contents for a quick overview of every resource available to you! And if you have any feedback on The Guidebook – please fill out this Google Form for us.
All Local Food Program Success Story Videos (Spanish and English) can be found here.