Lawmakers tried to reform Illinois’ food system. Here’s why it failed

M.J. Kellner’s royal blue and golden yellow semitrucks are a common sight throughout central Illinois. Every week, the wholesale food company delivers thousands of pounds of grocery items to state-owned facilities, including prisons, mental health centers, rehabilitation institutions and veterans homes. The company boasts that many of its customers are within a 100-mile radius of its Springfield headquarters.

But most of the food M.J. Kellner delivers comes from well beyond state lines.

In fact, of all the food consumed in Illinois, 95% of it comes from outside the state.

The Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP), proposed during this year’s Illinois General Assembly, would have required food vendors like M.J. Kellner to provide more information about how and where they source their food.

House Bill B3701 and Senate Bill 2187 would have significantly changed state food procurement practices, which advocates say are outdated and divert millions of public dollars out of state each year, instead of going to local farmers. The bills also would have raised standards for food companies’ labor, environmental and animal welfare practices.

However, state lawmakers did not pass the bills before a key legislative deadline in April.

“That is what you call a missed opportunity,” said Sen. Willie Preston, a Chicago Democrat, the Senate bill’s sponsor.

State institutions purchase and serve hundreds of thousands of meals daily, worth tens of millions of dollars in contracts. Advocates for the purchasing program want state agencies to send more public money to small local producers and distributors, especially those that provide fair wages and safe working conditions.

State agencies use dozens of private food distributors, but for the Department of Corrections, the state’s largest food buyer, nearly 70% goes to just two: M.J. Kellner and Advanced Commodities, Inc. The vast majority of those contracts, worth more than $156 million combined since 2021, supply food for the nearly 30,000 people incarcerated in Illinois.

M.J. Kellner did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of the companies are wholesale distributors. They buy large food quantities from producers, often at a large discount, and sell them to institutions, restaurants and other businesses.

Several state agencies opposed the bill, including the Illinois Department of Central Management Services, the agency responsible for most food purchases.

CMS, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies testified against the Good Food Purchasing Program at the House Agriculture Committee on March 18. Agency officials said then the policy would add additional red tape to an already complex process.

State Rep. Sonya Harper, a Chicago Democrat and chair of the House Agriculture and Conservation Committee, said state officials had ample time to address issues with her and should not have waited until the eleventh hour to raise objections.

With the bills dead, Harper, a sponsor of the House bill, filed a House joint resolution that, if passed, will extend the life of the task force and encourage, but not require, state agencies to share details about their food purchasing practices.

Corporate logistics meets local foods

Clint Bland’s commercial organic family farm in central Illinois is just a 5-minute drive from Jacksonville Correctional Facility, one of the state’s 27 adult prisons. He also raises beef and poultry, and began selling to several local school districts around central Illinois in 2024 as part of various local and federal programs that help schools buy more locally produced food.

But when asked if he’d ever thought about trying to sell his products to Jacksonville Correctional Center, Bland said he didn’t know where to start.

“I don’t even know who to contact,” Bland said. “It’s been hard enough just figuring out who the buyers are in certain schools. It’s hard to get a seat at the table, you know.”

Bland spent nearly a decade working in upper management for a major corporate food redistributor, Dot Foods, a sort of middleman for the middleman in the food supply chain. The company buys truckloads of food from manufacturers and then sells smaller quantities to smaller distributors.

In 2016, he and his wife started farming in Jacksonville, and in 2022, he turned farming into a full-time job. Inspired to strengthen the local food scene in his area, Bland later started an aggregation and distribution company for local producers called Farmers Alliance for Regional Marketing and Sales, or The Farms of Illinois for short.

Farmers often aren’t “the best” at customer service, delivery, invoicing and billing, said Bland adding, “They just want their hands in the soil.”

State agencies are required to award food contracts to the lowest compliant bidder who also meets established specifications. But in 2022, lawmakers allowed public schools to hire vendors that source local food products, even if the cost was higher.

Going with just the lowest bid forced schools to accept meals of substandard quality, which resulted in garbage cans full of uneaten food and ultimately, wasted money, advocates of the change said.

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Farmers feel left in the dust

Advocates for the local purchasing program say state support is especially important following the Trump administration’s cuts to two key federal programs: IL-EATS and the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure.

The IL-EATS program funneled $43 million in federal dollars last year to the state health department to contract with local farmers to supply food banks. The program represented around 30% of all sales for The Farms of Illinois but was cut by President Donald Trump in March.

The Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program provided federal funds for infrastructure, such as refrigerated trucks, walk-in coolers, wash stations and commercial dehydrators and dry racks — critical tools that help farmers access better market opportunities. The Trump administration eliminated the $6.5 million program in March.

Critics of Trump’s actions argue the cuts also contradict his push for U.S. farmers to sell more of their products domestically, particularly as an escalating trade war threatens to disrupt the export market.

Jackie de Bautista, executive director of Farmers Rising, a nonprofit agricultural education organization, said “shifting an entire food industry production system from row crops to local food requires a transition period.”

De Bautista added, this work already was happening and “was finally being supported and incentivized by our federal government (before being abruptly cut).”

Bland still devotes a small portion of his farmland to commodity crops like corn and soybeans. So when the USDA pulled the plug on two programs that had helped him grow his local food business, he was surprised to find a check from the agency in his mailbox. This time, it was to compensate him for increased fertilizer and pesticide costs and falling commodity prices.

He said the priorities of the USDA are out of balance.

“All of a sudden we got local food going away, and the government saying that that’s not important,” Bland said, “but prices got too low for you on your commodity, so we’re going to give you free money.”

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Raising labor standards

The Good Food Purchasing Program prioritizes five values: supporting local economies, fair labor conditions and compensation, nutritious whole foods with minimal harmful ingredients, animal welfare standards, and environmental sustainability through ecological sourcing and menu planning.

Full transparency would be essential at every level of the supply chain, advocates said. Under the policy, suppliers would eventually be required to share sourcing data — tracing products from farm to plate — and make that data public.

The program would prioritize companies that pay their workers a “livable wage,” encouraging state agencies to grant contracts to companies with higher scores.

For example, Tyson Foods, which sells meat to M.J. Kellner, has repeatedly been cited for child labor violations, including some tied to fatal incidents. Smithfield, another M.J. Kellner supplier and the world’s largest pork producer, has faced multiple complaints that the company disproportionately exposes low-income, rural, military, and Black communities to air and water pollution from the company’s biogas operations.

The program would require full supply chain transparency from all suppliers, making middlemen like M.J. Kellner show where their food comes from, how it gets from the farm to the plate, how much the company spent on it and at what quantity.

This can be easier said than done. A 2023 report produced by Food Chain Workers Alliance and HEAL Food Alliance, two coalition groups consisting of workers and producers, revealed after 10 years of similar food purchasing programs operating in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, institutions were only able to obtain a sliver of their supply chain sourcing data — and they rarely shared this information with the public.

Cook County adopted the GFPP in 2018. In theory, county procurement decision-makers should examine working conditions for food warehouse workers.

But a 2023 survey found that more than half the food chain workers in the Chicago area still earned wages too low to feed their families, and three-quarters lacked employer-provided health care. Workers who spoke up about their rights were fired or suspended.

Roger Cooley, executive director of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, which crafted and advocated for the state bill, said the point isn’t necessarily to cancel or not renew contracts with existing vendors if they’re not doing a good job, but to raise standards when shortcomings are identified.

And if a food company has OSHA violations, a state department can “go back to that supplier and be like, ‘Look, either you address these OSHA violations and give us a clear plan for it, or we’re going to have to shift our purchasing to somebody else,’” he said.

“It’s more of a carrot than a stick method,” said Cooley, stressing this is an incentive process, not a mandate. “This is a long process. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

What killed the food reform bill

The Good Food Purchasing Program not only stalled this year in committee, it lacked clear support from Gov. JB Pritzker, who faces challenging budget constraints amid federal funding cuts.

Pritzker said with the state facing losses of roughly $11 billion due to federal cuts, there is a lot pulling on the budget.

“In a world where we’ve got to worry about keeping our rural hospitals open when we lose what I think we may in Medicaid, it’s going to be triage,” he said. “Something is going to close.”

Cooley, of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, doesn’t believe the proposed program would raise costs.

“Oftentimes, departments and agencies feel like they’re under the gun, underfunded, and under-resourced, and adding anything new is a stretch for them,” Cooley said.

Scratch cooking, equipment upgrades and choosing local, seasonal ingredients can keep budgets down, Cooley added.

School kitchens in Chicago and Pawnee conduct taste tests to figure out what the students’ preferences are, reducing waste.

Beyond Green, a Chicago-based company, helps train institutional staff on how to cook large quantities from scratch without increasing costs.

The company even weighs the portions before it’s served to students and weighs the trash afterward to see how much is thrown away.

Tyler Bohannon, legislative liaison for the Illinois Department of Agriculture, said his department opposes the bill because his agency doesn’t have the technical know-how to administer a formal food procurement process, and it could significantly delay food procurement at state-operated facilities.

Ron Wilson, deputy director of Central Management Services and head of the Bureau of Strategic Sourcing, said at the March 18 hearing the bill failed to account for the additional red tape it would create.

In a written statement to Investigate Midwest, a spokesperson from CMS said that centralized purchasing has been the state’s approach since at least 2004.

“This is standard practice across most large-scale governmental units and is considered a best practice as it takes advantage of economies of scale and significantly reduces redundant work requirements,” the statement said.

• Investigate Midwest is an independent, nonprofit newsroom. Its mission is to serve as the public’s watchdog over influential corporations and institutions through in-depth and data-driven investigative journalism.