Title
Bid Award for Food to Supply Summer Nutrition Program (B)
Explanation
With the assistance of the Purchasing Division, the Recreation & Parks Division of the City of Gainesville solicited vendors for the FY 04 Summer Nutrition Program. The Department was unsuccessful in securing a food service management company to supply the food for this year's program; therefore, the Department explored other options to supply food to its sites.
The USDA and the Department of Education administer the Summer Nutrition Program nationally and offer several food delivery options for Sponsors, such as the City, to use in acquiring food for their programs. Sponsors may use food service management companies, local school authorities, or they may do self-preparation of their meals. The Department explored all of these options as part of this year's process, and in the end the only option left was to do self-preparation.
The self-preparation option allows the Sponsor to purchase the food components for the meals and assemble them at each Summer Nutrition site, or at a centralized kitchen for all sites. Since the Department had recently cut back the kitchen operations at the Ironwood Golf Course, a decision was made to do the centralized self-preparation of meals at Ironwood.
As part of this process, Ironwood solicited quotations for the food components from two known vendors, Florida Food Service and Sysco. The prices quoted by each vendor were based on the State approved 10-day cycle menu for the Department's program. The vendor with the lowest average 10-day cost was Sysco. Therefore, the Department requests permission to award the bid and issue the purchase order to Sysco, in the amount of $37,840, based on an average daily price of $1.72 for both lunch and afternoon supplement, for the 22,000 meals to be served over a nine-week period.
Although the program has already commenced, the formal bid award was delayed until the appropriate State agency appro...
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