Victoria Quach
Director of Sustainability, Daylight Foods
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Victoria Quach is the Sustainability Program Coordinator at Daylight Foods, where she helps institutions source food in ways that better reflect a sustainable food system. Her work focuses on building connections between institutions and farmers, food hubs, and vendors offering local, seasonal, organic, and socially responsible products.
She develops tools and strategies that make sustainable procurement more practical and transparent, from sustainability reporting and supplier onboarding to seasonal planning resources and developing educational materials. She also helps create stronger market opportunities for small and values-aligned producers, including local, BIPOC-, women-, and family-owned businesses.
Victoria earned her degree from UC Berkeley and brings a background in sustainable food systems, institutional dining, and stakeholder engagement. She is passionate about using food purchasing as a way to support farmers, nourish communities, and build a more just and resilient food system.
Modeling a Campus Food Ecosystem
The University of California, Merced is a model for a sustainable regional food system while directly improving its students' well-being in California’s Central Valley. UC Merced presents a scalable, equity-centered model for a campus sustainable food ecosystem that integrates sustainability initiatives, Procurement, Campus Dining, Basic Needs programs, Campus Community Garden, small BIPOC farmers, and Daylight Foods, a California-based food distributor.
This session will highlight how institutions can shift from fragmented food efforts to a coordinated ecosystem that prioritizes access, affordability, and environmental stewardship. At the core of this model is a sustainability focused procurement approach that increases sourcing from small, BIPOC-owned farms, supported by a trusted local distributor to streamline administrative challenges, aggregation, logistics, and consistency of supply. Campus Dining becomes a primary anchor buyer, while Basic Needs provides service through its food pantry and meal voucher systems to ensure that students have access to nutritious, culturally relevant food for those experiencing food insecurity. The student run Campus Community Garden provides its harvest to the Food Pantry allowing students to see and experience a local food system in action.
Session attendees will explore operational frameworks for cross-department collaboration, including shared metrics tied to climate action goals, waste reduction, and social impact. The presentation will also outline strategies for building long-term partnerships with farmers, including forward contracting, seasonality planning, and capacity-building support.
Through real-world examples and implementation tools, attendees will learn how to align procurement, student success, and sustainability goals into a unified system that strengthens local economies and advances climate justice in California’s Central Valley.
By the end of the session, participants will leave with a practical roadmap to design or expand their own campus food ecosystem that nourishes students, empowers farmers, and builds resilient, community-centered food systems.
Victoria Quach
Director of Sustainability, Daylight Foods
Actions
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