Nani Moré

Nani has created a new healthy, sustainable, and accessible food model for catering kitchens in schools, care homes, and hospitals, revitalizing local agriculture production.

When Nani worked as a chef in a care home, she was horrified by the low-quality food given to the elderly residents. She created new recipes with fresh, seasonal, and local food but was told that these meal plans were over-budget and that she had to continue to cook with frozen and processed foodstuffs. From that experience, she envisioned catering kitchens as a huge opportunity for systemic change with a focus on demonstrating that costs and pricing are not the problem.

Nani decided to approach the concept of quality food (healthy and sustainable) from a unique perspective, uniting local agriculture, public catering services, and municipal procurement in a strong alliance. She has named this concept “climate cuisine,” directly linking a healthy diet to local sourcing with minimal environmental impact.

Nani promotes a change in the food model through a new municipal public procurement system without increasing the food procurement budget. Her new tender design improves the food offered to children, the elderly, and the sick whilst promoting sustainable production and local businesses.

By reordering the structure, changing the menus, and changing the quality criteria of the tendering process, she creates healthy habits and promotes a much more sustainable production model. As well as providing a balanced menu she also creates enough demand for local producers, allowing them to commit to supplying, and by cutting out the intermediaries, offer accessible prices. She names this process “short supply circuits.”

With a single tender she can therefore supply all the kitchens in a municipality, guaranteeing the same quality in all the public kitchens with primary local and fresh food. This guaranteed volume means that catering kitchens become a key lever to incentivize local production. With 1.5 million meals offered in public catering kitchens daily, Nani’s model has the power to radically transform the proximity agricultural sector in Spain.

In the long term, her vision also encompasses a wider effect for her “short supply circuits,” where producers who supply the catering kitchens become a more integral, well known growth actor in the local community supplying local trade and supermarkets.

Spain has the capacity to produce up to 80% of its food consumption needs, but currently 60% of the food consumed in Spain is imported. Transportation of food is responsible for approximately 25 to 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC). Proximity and ecological production are still incipient models with reduced demand making sustainability difficult. In general, this kind of health food is considered a luxury due to cost.

The most vulnerable people have limited access to fresh and quality food and little knowledge on how food is directly connected to their health. As a direct consequence they are more obese and cannot assume the cost of a healthy diet. In Spain, by 2030 more than 80% of the adult population will be overweight, with a direct cost to the health system of 3,000 million euros/year. By 2050 it is expected that 50% of the total population will be obese.

Public administrations prioritize cost rather than the quality of food in their communities and the little regulation that exists in the public food procurement is not being applied. Procurement tenders do not separate food prices from services, instead asking companies to give a global price for food plus transportation plus kitchen services, leading to very little real information on food prices and food quality. As a result, food in collective kitchens is mostly unhealthy, processed, and frozen, and 54% of tenders are awarded to 10 companies who offer joint services and poor quality.

95% of the workers in these canteens are not given specific training for catering kitchens, many of them having only the most basic of food preparation training. This is a sector with more than 200,000 employees, and the vast majority of the people employed in the kitchens do not have input into the meal design but rather just mechanically prepare the food. Internal catering services from kitchens are progressively eliminated and replaced by those who transport menus from industrialized kitchens.

Sustainability is an issue also for local producers, who, not being able to have guaranteed direct demand via a B2C model, must reach the market via intermediaries who offer them very low purchase pricing.

In 2013 Nani created Menjadors Ecològics to respond technically to the catering kitchens that sought to change the model but did not know how to integrate the idea of local, sustainable production with the consumption in catering kitchens. The kitchens were not designed to work with seasonal production (machinery, prep spaces, etc.) and lacked the professionalization needed to assume changes such as moving from frozen vegetables to fresh vegetables.

Nani facilitates the work of both the municipalities and catering services by identifying local production or the possibilities for supplying fresh food of proximity. She analyzes the food cost by ingredient, by meal, and by contract to stay within budget, generates new healthy menus with more vegetable-based proteins, and trains kitchen staff to make the recipes work.

Nani believes that her strategy of changing the model in collective kitchens and guaranteeing fair prices is key to achieving the EU strategy known as “From Farm to Table” (25% of the European agricultural production organic by 2030). Her strategy is to make this model sustainable over time and not dependent on the sensitivity of the individual kitchen’s staff, so everything is researched and documented creating a standard methodology.

Changing the municipal buying procurement

To make her vision a reality at a national level, Nani’s strategy is to work with the municipalities to help them create or modify tenders (previously they bought by price in an unstructured and hand-picked manner) to focus on product quality, and to help local producers opt for these tenders where they have their sales assured for at least the four-year contract period.

For this purpose, she has separated procurement into i) sourcing proximity fresh food (tendering by batches of food adapted to the different productive typologies of the region [livestock, orchards, fruit trees, etc.]) and ii) cooking and serving services and facilities (before these two parts were unified so only companies that could provide these two services could opt to the tenders, leaving out producers). This change has led producers to diversify their production making them more economically and environmentally sustainable, with the added benefit of consolidating short supply circuits, reducing their carbon footprint, and ensuring the continuity of farms thanks to a price in line with real production costs. In addition, Nani's model has led to the recovery of the Mediterranean diet, the creation of healthy habits, and dignifying the profession of cooks in community kitchens.

Checks and balances: Defensive strategy for awareness and compliancy

Nani's other strategic line is to challenge tenders that are not following quality compliance. In 2019, a Spanish law for public contracting established that tenders must score the quality of food with 51 points and the price with 49 points. For this reason, Nani, together with a lawyer, investigates and reports tenders to demonstrate that many of them do not meet the requirements of the law in terms of product quality. Their initial approach is to use their legal report as a way to open the door to local government, start a dialogue, and initiate change. In cases of recurring incompliance, they present legal action.

Collective kitchens as a first step for transformation in the community

If collective kitchens enable local producers to maintain, increase, or diversify production with these short supply circuits, in the long term this change can trickle down to local shops and markets, making healthy food affordable to the community.

Nani’s organization works with local Health Centres and community initiatives such as parenting classes to increase awareness, facilitate connections, and ultimately change production-consumption dynamics.
Chef 2030 and Menu2030 “transform the menu to transform the food model.”

Nani's great successes have been to raise awareness, train public catering cooks about the consequences of the current food model and create a national network of Chefs with a shared vision: kitchens, whether they are kitchens from restaurants or collective catering kitchens, can be the driving force for change in the food model, and the configuration of their menu is the key to achieving this.

This network that Nani initiated consists of 25 chefs who work in collective kitchens throughout Spain, collaborating by training kitchen staff in their transition to a more sustainable model and by initiating changes in the tendering systems around Spain.

In addition, the Chefs have participated in the design, production, and validation of the technical reports of the recipes that appear in the guide “Menu 2030, transform the menu to transform the model”, published last year after a great collective effort. The Menu 2030 is the practical guide of Nani’s model with concrete examples (it can be downloaded for free) that offers the tools and knowledge necessary to transform the menu of the communities into a healthier, more sustainable, and fairer one, thus supporting the agro-ecological transition of the food system and its territories. It encompasses the full range of knowledge, from the foundations for healthy and sustainable eating and the structure of the menu, to more technical topics, such as the ratio of kitchen staff, the food item, or the incorporation of specific criteria in public tenders.

Network and Alliances

Nani works with the main organizations that share the same values and are experts in raising awareness and education on sustainable food and training for cooks, teachers, students, and families, such to have a greater impact together.

She has also initiated a two-year study in collaboration with the Pediatric Association to scientifically quantify the benefits of healthy eating in municipal nursery schools.

For the specific work on tenders she works with a pro bono lawyer, and for her work in nutrition and kitchens she works with both different nutritionists and the Chef 2030 network.

Scaling and Replicating

The Chef 2030 network is a key vehicle for geographical scaling, as many of them are directly involved in training and accompanying public administrations and kitchens in their transition to a more sustainable model.

For greater scalability, Nani is working on software to digitize all her knowledge. All of Nani´s findings are currently being incorporated into this software, which can be shared with any interested organization (menus, costs, producers, seasonal production, recipes). The platform will include a) a searchable directory of local producers on a national level, b) video recipes for the creation of multiple menus (x200 servings, x400 servings etc.), c) standard measurements for product and budgetary control for multiple menus, and d) access for local producers. Nani plans to include a section that allows an administration to "audit" the bidding party to see how it meets the established requirements. The software will provide real-time information to help the collective catering kitchen comply with the tender criteria with no extra work from the personnel. For a small fee, any collective kitchen can follow the steps to becoming an agent of change in their town.

Nani finances much of her activity through the public administrations that contract her services and raises funds from Foundations and pro bono alliances. Fundación Daniele y Nina Carasso has financed the Menu 2030 guide and they are currently funding the software that Nani is developing.

Social Impact

The most important impact of her model is the union between production and catering. The Chef 2030 Network has managed to unite and empower a community of professionals who individually would not have been able to implement the change of model in their kitchens. Its model has been applied in 173 kitchens with a total of 30,000 daily menus that have applied the 2030 menu model successfully, highlighting its commitment to the primary proximity sector and guaranteeing a high consumption of vegetables and fruits.

Nani has organized 13 municipal tendering processes, all guaranteed for four years. These kitchens have changed between 50% and 90% of their purchasing to local productions. This commitment is the key to strengthening and consolidating local agriculture.

Nani is the daughter of farmers. She grew up in the countryside along with her parents, siblings, and grandparents, and was always very much involved in the care of the orchards. Her grandmother was passionate about cooking, and as a child she spent most of her time in the kitchen with her watching the culinary processes, helping in the kitchen and with the weekly purchase at the market. These experiences were undoubtedly what woke her passion for cooking and healthy eating and what led her to study catering and hospitality.

At the end of her chef's studies, Nani worked for many years in catering restaurants with different specialties. During these years she also had the experience of working for a special kind of collective as she was the chef for The Cirque du Soleil, which give her the experience of knowing local food and producers. She then created her own farm-to-table restaurant which didn’t succeed. In 2006 she was head chef of a slow food restaurant where she worked long hours including all holidays. That year Nani became a mother and decided to change jobs to try and balance work and family life.

That decision took her to a job in a care home where she discovered a hidden reality. She had to work with low quality foods (frozen vegetables, frozen pink veal burgers, broth concentrated in bags...), to prepare a menu which was not adapted to the needs of the elderly and where she was alone in the kitchen to cook for 225 residents. This experience gave her the motivation to study how to improve the quality of the food, the menu proposal, and the cooking ratio. The result was positive, but the management of the care home was not interested in the proposal. Nani decided to quit her job to advance her new idea of demonstrating that collective kitchens can provide quality food to their users for the same price.

She found a job at a nursery school and managed to convince them to implement her proposal. The beginnings were complicated, but the joint work of cooking and management allowed her first to consolidate the project and second to change the municipal tender to ensure sustainability over time.

In 2012 she made the documentary “The Dish or Life” with the intention of communicating a manifesto about the potential to change the model in the communities and get others to join her cause and make the current problem visible. The documentary generated a lot of interest and demand from other schools interested in changing their model, and in 2013 she founded Menjadors Ecològics, the first, and to date only, organization specialized in the management of healthy and sustainable food systems in Spain for catering kitchens.

Nani is passionate about her work and has a strong commitment to solve problems. With the Covid-19 lockdown and the subsequent social crisis, she has moved heaven and earth with public administrations from various territories (Baleares, Galicia, Pamplona, collaborations in Valencia and the Canary Islands) to make public resources (both kitchens and working cooks of closed schools) available and use them to cook for the families of these centers with few resources and thus guarantee them daily food. After lockdown, Nani has expanded the idea through her Chef network and is promoting the use of such kitchens in the evenings to feed the neighborhood community with healthy and nutritional meals.