The Federal Acquisition defines a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) as follows:

A blanket purchase agreement (BPA) is a simplified method of filling anticipated repetitive needs for supplies or services by establishing "charge accounts" with qualified sources of supply.

It is a type of order the government uses when they have a requirement for a product or service, in this case light refreshment, and we do not know the exact quantity we need or when we need it. There is no minimum guaranteed funding on these BPAs.

- It is my understanding that there are approximately 1,500 meetings total in a calendar year with 20 participants at each meeting. However, in the document that you sent 50% of these meetings will be catered by a small business. Since our company does not fall into this category, does that mean that the maximum about of meetings that we could potentially cater would be 750 annually?
- Your document also states that you will be selecting a minimum of 3 vendors and a maximum of 10. Does that further mean that the maximum amount of meetings that our company could cater would be 250 annually?

NSF plans to set up blanket purchase agreements with multiple vendors. This is not a competed action where the winning bidder receives all of the business for this particular service. As stated there also is no guaranteed minimum made to winning bidders. Once these Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) are set up, members of our program staff would place orders under one of these BPAs for a particular meeting using their government credit card.

NSF intends to establish BPAs with multiple vendors and we have a goal of 50% of those vendors being small businesses. Once these multiple BPAs are established there will no percentage requirements on the actual purchasing.

This RFQ is hereby extended in an effort to improve competition.