Food Sourcing Five Minutes From Campus

If you’ve eaten in one of our dining locations, you’ve likely had local produce sourced through Palmer Food Services.

In several of our dining locations, we use locally sourced products like Soyboy, Red Jacket, Father Sam’s, Great Lakes, Barilla, Zweigles, Al Cohens, and Seneca Foods, just to name a few of dozens of products Palmer Food Services sources directly to RIT. 

A team of chefs and managers made a trip down the street to Palmer Food facilities, a five-minute drive from our Henrietta campus.

The facilities were an impressive operation, with its distribution center being almost 200,000 square feet, two dozen docks for shipping and receiving, and a 60,000 square foot freezer.

Palmer Food also has a state-of-the-art USDA-inspected, Safe Quality Foods (SQF) certified meat production facility. SQF is a Global Food Safety Initiative recognized internationally for food safety, quality, and compliance.

Palmer Food is a fifth-generation business with roots deep in New York State, sourcing local produce to restaurants, retailers, and food service operations throughout the state to thousands of entities, including RIT!

They also deliver custom-cut meats. All of our burger patties that are halal-certified and chicken are sourced directly through Palmer Food. We go through 40,000 burger patties in one year alone!

Palmer Food is recognized as one of the country’s leading independent distributors of Certified Angus Beef®. This is built by a network of family-owned farms and ranches who have a passion for sharing their best beef.

Certified Angus Beef® allows us the opportunity to be more sustainable, by being part of the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (USRSB). USRSB works to advance, support, and communicate continuous improvement in the sustainability of the U.S. beef value chain.

We love the opportunity of partnering with Palmer Food to access high-quality, locally sourced products and get meat and poultry that is certified at the highest standard – from sourcing and manufacturing to storage and distribution.

Susie Freeman, supervisor at The Market at Global Village, was able to attend the tour of Palmer Food facilities and stated “It was so cool to see firsthand the behind-the-scenes operation. As a supervisor at The Market at Global Village, I’m responsible for taking inventory and ordering products and Palmer Food helps keep us well-stocked. You’d be surprised how much is sourced from them.”