The Nourish to Flourish Initiative Brings GDSN® to a Broken K-12 Supply Chain

The game has changed for planning and accounting for school meals.  Supply chain issues are front and center now more than ever.  It’s one reason why operators are moving to a new paradigm that is anchored in industry standards.  The core of the system is the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN).  While GDSN “raw data” as published is standardized, it is not user friendly for many of the purposes that K-12 Operators care most about. Critical product attributes including variable portion and pack sizing and scaling, meal pattern credit, nutrients, allergens, USDA Foods content, country or state of origin and potentially unacceptable ingredients are not easily accessible.

In 2017, at the Nourish to Flourish industry summit, work began on a collaborative effort known as the K-12 Data Sharing & Analytics Initiative.  K-12 stakeholders formed a community of Suppliers, Distributors, Operators, and Government Agencies adopting GDSN to standardize product data ​ focused on the key attributes that operators require. GDSN Connect was created for operators to access the Nourish to Flourish Database, a singular, unified data warehouse with over 190,000 GDSN published product specifications and thousands of non-branded “generic” foods.