Universities, hospitals, and other large institutional food buyers have significant power to improve animal welfare through procurement standards. Institutional campaigns are a high-leverage advocacy target.
Institutional procurement advocacy represents one of the most tractable and high-leverage animal welfare interventions available to advocates with limited resources. Universities, hospitals, and government institutions often respond to sustained advocacy from constituents - students, faculty, patients, and citizens - in ways that directly translate into welfare policy changes affecting enormous numbers of animals through purchasing decisions. The aggregate effect of welfare-committed institutional procurement is significant: a single large university serving millions of meals per year has more market power than thousands of individual consumers. Student-led campaigns have proven particularly effective at universities, where students are both constituents and a significant portion of the meal-purchasing population.