Senior Specialist, Supply Chains; Values-Aligned

Full Time, Remote

Limited Service through December 2028*

Founded in 2009, the Chef Ann Foundation (CAF) believes that all children should have equal access to fresh, healthy, delicious food providing them the foundation to thrive and meet their true potential. We ensure that school food professionals have the resources, funding and support they need to provide cook-from-scratch meals that support the health of children and our planet. To date, we’ve reached over 16,000 schools and over 4.4 million children in all 50 states with our school food programming.

CAF provides training and technical assistance to School Food Authorities (SFAs) in developing innovative procurement strategies, including but not limited to collective purchasing that allows school districts to pool resources and leverage their combined purchasing power. Our vision is to create a scalable national model that empowers districts to source values-aligned foods, benefiting students, farmers, producers, and communities while advancing meaningful transformation of the school food system.

VAPCs are a mechanism for K-12 school districts to work together to advance the shared values of both school districts and food suppliers by leveraging the collective buying power of school districts through cooperatives, buying groups, or other group purchasing mechanisms, and fostering supply chain collaboration to enhance access to and establish fair pricing for values-aligned foods.

HSFP is a work-based learning experience that aims to prepare individuals for job opportunities in healthy, scratch-cook school food programs. The HSFP program focuses on supporting workforce readiness and professional growth for new and incumbent school food operators.

This position resides on our School Food Operations team and reports to the Senior Director of Procurement. As a seasoned supply chain practitioner, the Senior Specialist will propose and operationalize values-aligned supply chain innovations, strengthen regional food system infrastructure, and serve as a bridge among producers, distributors, food hubs, logistics coordinators, and school districts. Success in this role requires deep knowledge of food supply chains, regional market dynamics, food sourcing strategies, and K–12 procurement regulations and policies.

The Senior Specialist will lead the development of scalable, sustainable supply chain strategies for Values-Aligned Purchasing Collectives (VAPCs), California Healthy School Food Pathway (HSFP), and other CAF programs in priority states. Core responsibilities include:

• Leverage the collective purchasing power of SFAs enrolled in CAF programs, including Healthy School Food Pathway, Values-Aligned Purchasing Collectives, and CAF’s key programs, to drive supply chain innovations that increase SFAs' purchases of values-aligned foods.
• Provide tailored technical assistance to SFAs navigating values-aligned sourcing challenges, limited supply, and logistics constraints.
• Offer strategic insights for how to improve CAF’s SFA procurement support to school districts, informed by CAF and SFA program priorities as well as supplier availability and capacity.

• Develop, maintain, and nurture relationships with values-aligned suppliers, processors, aggregators, and manufacturers across priority states.
• Collaborate with CAF’s Programs team to improve upon the internal-facing preferred supplier program to ensure accurate documentation of producer and product attributes for CAF’s centralized values-aligned supplier database (described in section
  4).
• Convene focus groups (e.g., farmers, hubs, distributors, SFAs) to identify bottlenecks and co-design operational solutions.

• Map and optimize distribution pathways through conventional distributors, food hubs, cooperatives, and direct-to-district models offering scalable logistics solutions that expand SFA access to values-aligned foods, such as:
• In key states,…