In the past few years, various countries, regions and cities from low-income to high-income economies have been developing a range of food procurement initiatives designed to use the regular demand for food on the part of government entities as a policy instrument targeting broader development objectives. This paper aims to help build this dialogue, bringing to the food procurement and rural development literature an analysis of the various legal mechanisms that can be used to align the regulatory framework in pursuit of broader development goals by means of public procurement in the form of home-grown school feeding programmes.