USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jointly announced the Harvest to Hallways initiative on Aug. 24, a program connecting local farms directly to school cafeteria supply chains to replace processed food with fresh, locally sourced meals.
The initiative is backed by $32.5 million in funding from HHS’s DEPEND program and targets improvements to school kitchen infrastructure and local agricultural procurement systems.
The National School Lunch Program serves approximately 30 million children daily, according to USDA data. The Harvest to Hallways initiative aims to shift those meals toward locally grown produce and proteins, the agencies said.
The program invests in the physical infrastructure — kitchen equipment, cold storage and preparation facilities — needed to handle fresh local ingredients that require different processing than the shelf-stable, pre-packaged products that currently dominate school food service, according to the USDA announcement.
The initiative reflects the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which emphasizes food quality in federal nutrition programs, USDA said. Secretary Kennedy has been particularly vocal about removing processed food from school meals.
Local farmers and ranchers stand to benefit from institutional procurement contracts that provide steady demand for their products. School food service programs have historically relied on large national distributors, making local sourcing a logistical challenge.
The success of the initiative will depend on building procurement systems that can reliably connect thousands of school districts with local agricultural producers, a supply chain challenge that previous farm-to-school efforts have struggled to solve at scale.