Today, foodservice in the military is much more accommodating to the serviceman's tastes than in years past. Of course, there's still the mess hall service, but even it has many more food and nutrition options to offer servicemen. The base commissary is stocked with American-style pre-prepared frozen foods and thousands of products you would find in any commercial grocer.

Years ago the Department of Defense (DoD) realized that servicemen and women preferred eating whatever they wanted to eat off post, whenever they wanted to eat it. This took food revenue off base and put servicemen and women in the local population where anything could and often did happen. Now, many military installations offer even more foodservice selection in the form of themed restaurants, like Johnny Rockets, for the foodservice revenue and to keep service men and women on base where they can find fewer.

As with commercial foodservice, the range of menu items for the military is huge—from appetizers, BBQ and chili, to Mexican, Asian and Italian foods—all uniquely prepared to military foodservice specs. With an all-volunteer armed force protecting the country's interests, taking care of the serviceman's nutritional needs is a high priority.

Hundreds of food manufacturers service our military. The DoD approves of and establishes the Prime Vendor, or foodservice distributor, for every installation. Foodservice brokers meet with decision makers at the Prime Vendor to qualify their products for foodservice. The manufacturer's broker must be licensed to sell any of his food products to the military, approved within the DoD's system and assigned the right manufacturers tracking codes, called NAPAs.

The broker's job, as in commercial foodservice, is to deliver solutions to the customer (the military) that will help them with their service operations. The best way for the broker to accomplish this is to have more products assigned NAPA identification codes, because without them his food products can't be considered for use in military foodservice and his "solutions" will be limited.

All DoD foodservice is managed under this system to control the safety, quality, security and cost of foodservice for the military. If food manufacturers want to provide service for the troops, their brokers need to learn the system, play by the rules and earn the right to provide for the ultimate end-users, our young men and women tasked with the protection of our way of life.

Windsor Foods is a proud supplier to the DoD foodservice program. To locate a Windsor Foods broker for military foodservice visit http://www.windsorfoods.com/locate.html.

As an award-winning foodservice manufacturer, Windsor Foods provides a wide range of products for military foodservice, including custom manufacturing, private labels and many other options available to our military customers—options with which they can bolster their operations, as well as their morale.