Our Territory on the School Menu (Il nostro territorio in mensa) is a pilot initiative developed by the Trento Urban Food Lab within the SURFIT project. It explores how school meals can become a catalyst for connecting local food production, public procurement, education and territorial development.

The initiative emerged from a working group established during the 2025 Bio.logicA festival. It brings together the Municipality and the University of Trento, the Comunità della Valle dei Laghi, the school-catering provider Risto3, local farmers and agricultural organisations. Following a mapping of the products available from local farms, the partners jointly designed a menu reflecting the agricultural resources and food traditions of the Trentino area.

The pilot was launched at the Comenius Comprehensive School in Cognola, involving primary and lower-secondary school pupils. On four dedicated days during the 2025–2026 academic year, students were offered meals prepared with ingredients supplied by local producers. Alongside introducing local food into the school canteen, the initiative encouraged children to learn where their food comes from, who produces it and how food choices affect health, the environment and the local economy.

The four SURFIT scaling routes as design principles

The pilot applies the four scaling routes identified by SURFIT—scaling deep, scaling out, scaling up and scaling through—as complementary design principles. Rather than treating scaling simply as an increase in size, these principles make it possible to consider the different ways in which a small experiment can contribute to broader food-system transformation.

Scaling deep involves changing values, perceptions and everyday practices. In this pilot, school meals become an educational and cultural experience through which children can discover the origins, seasonality and value of local food. The initiative seeks to strengthen their connection with the surrounding territory and foster greater awareness of the social and environmental implications of eating.

Scaling out means extending an initiative to involve more people, organisations and places. The Cognola experiment provides an initial model that can be adapted and replicated in other schools. It also creates opportunities to involve a wider range of local producers and gradually increase the presence of locally sourced food across Trento’s school-meal system.

Scaling up means increasing the scale of the initiative so that it reaches a growing number of pupils and families. Starting with the pilot at the Comenius Comprehensive School in Cognola, the aim is to progressively extend the initiative to other schools, enabling more children and their families to experience, understand and appreciate food produced within their local territory.

Scaling through refers to the transformation of existing systems through collaboration between grassroots initiatives and established institutions. In this pilot, the Municipality of Trento plays a central role as a convener and institutional intermediary, bringing together actors who usually operate in separate fields—including local producers, agricultural organisations, researchers, the authority responsible for school catering and the catering provider. By creating the conditions for dialogue, coordination and joint experimentation, the Municipality enables these actors to address logistical, organisational and regulatory barriers that none of them could overcome alone, thereby facilitating change from within the existing school-food system.

By combining these four routes, Our Territory on the School Menu goes beyond the provision of a limited number of local meals. It functions as a real-world experiment in democratic food procurement: needs, resources and purchasing arrangements are collectively examined and redesigned to make school catering healthier, more sustainable and more closely connected to the local food system.