Governments are facing the challenge of feeding students in schools in a city environment in a process that revolves around the coordination of multiple producers, distributors, logistics operators and traders of perishable foods. This paper aims to analyse food collection and distribution to assess the potential of urban food systems regarding school feeding. To do so, we compared school feeding distribution systems in Brazil and France to identify the main issues and investigate the role of local food systems. Our results showed that all cities are concerned about the involvement of short food supply chains to provide vegetables and fruits for schools to promote small local farming but there are cultural characteristics that require the use of different approaches.