By Sarah Fritschner, Kentucky Lantern · June 2, 2026

The University of Kentucky has hired Compass Group to manage dining, maintenance, grounds and other services at the university and at UK Healthcare. This cuts short the time that Aramark (another multinational corporation), was hired to provide dining services.

This change has raised questions about whether 400 or so Aramark dining workers will keep their jobs. Even before the university publicly stated that all jobs and benefits will be retained, there was no need for alarm. Service workers are in short supply. Compass won’t go on a firing spree.

What we could lose with Aramark’s ouster is significant income to Kentucky farmers and businesses that have adapted over the last 12 years to support a nascent regional food system. Since 2014, Aramark has been contractually obligated to buy Kentucky-grown food, including produce, beef, chicken and more. 

Last year alone, more than $1.5 million was spent on Kentucky farm impact purchases, helping increase farmer incomes and increasing on-farm employment. For example, a relationship between UK Dining (Aramark) and a Kentucky pork producer spreads $10,000 per month through the agriculture sector: livestock from Hart and Larue counties is processed at Trackside Butcher Shoppe in Henry County. Clem’s, a family-owned Lexington business, distributes some of the meat to Kroger Field to be served as pulled pork, and some to family-owned Custom Food Solutions in Louisville to be blended with Kentucky milk and flour to make sausage gravy that’s served in UK dining facilities.

During the contract negotiation between Compass and the university administration – particularly Eric Monday and the contract advisory committee – it’s important to secure the livelihood of farmers and stabilize the progress that has been made so far to create a regional food system.

Setting up a local food economy

In 2014, the university hired Aramark as the dining contractor and negotiated a deal that would (among other things) 1) commit to buying Kentucky agriculture products and 2) commit to funding an academic “food institute” that would support local agriculture.

At that time, Kentucky farmers were in a transition. A majority of tobacco farmers had decided to quit growing tobacco – a dependable source of income for generations that accounted a great deal for the strength of Kentucky’s farm economy. Farmers who quit growing tobacco were given an annual payout from funds received from Tobacco Master Settlement Funds. In 2014, those annual payments ceased.

Say what you will about the harms of tobacco, it was lucrative enough for small farms to grow and deliver a significant and dependable income to farmers. Without tobacco, farmers had to depend on growing other things to make a living. Harder still was finding a market for those products.

A contractually guaranteed market is a unicorn in corporate dining accounts. With the UK contract, Aramark committed to spending $2 million on local food its first year. Half of that amount was spent on Coca-Cola, which it counted as “local” because the bottling plant was in Fayette County. 

That was the first, and worst, but not the only rough patch. Defining what local food is was a major step. The “food institute,” created by Aramark’s contractual commitment, became The Food Connection, served as the lead on a US Department of Agriculture effort to establish definitions for “farm-impact” purchasing, as opposed to relying on “local” as a catch-all description. 

And that was the easy part. Figuring out how to get food from the farm into the dining hall has required every bit of a dozen years – from training produce farmers to handle food safely to finding a company to make heat-and-serve spaghetti sauce with local tomatoes. So many impediments keep farmers out of the local food market place – and institutional dining establishments seem to incorporate them all. UK has helped remove some of those barriers. 

The future of local food at UK

Requiring a contractual commitment to purchase local food, setting minimum purchases and establishing monetary penalties for non-compliance is the very least the university should do during this contract negotiation with Compass.  

Purchases should continue to be assessed and reported annually.

In addition to local purchases, the contract should contain language that continues the UK land-grant mission, educating farmers on best practices for institutional markets and finding additional markets for the farm products. 

Local food support is a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars that will change hands during the course of this contract. But it will have an oversized impact on the stability of farm income and economic growth in Kentucky.