PROBLEM: In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic closed school buildings across the country, disrupting the USDA’s school meal programs that provide breakfast and lunch to 30 million students each day. In response, the USDA waived the typical school and summer meal requirements, allowing for new flexibility including grab-and-go boxes and multi-day pickup. However, despite the increased flexibility in meal service guidelines, there remained major barriers to access: families didn’t have transportation to meal distribution sites, hours of operation conflicted with online learning schedules, and the menu offerings relied heavily on packaged, shelf-stable food that did not reflect the cultural preferences of communities.

PARTNERS: The City of Chelsea was among the cities hardest hit by the pandemic nationwide, and 4,000 of their 6,255 students stopped receiving any school meals. We partnered with the City of Chelsea, led by City Manager Tom Ambrosino, as well as local food business Stock Pot Malden and the YMCA of Greater Boston, to pilot a new and innovative solution. As it grew in Massachusetts, we went on to partner with the Obama Foundation to bring this model to Chicago.

SOLUTION: Together, we realized that, in much the same way the My Way Café program was able to utilize existing USDA funding to provide fresh, scratch-cooked meals to students, the new flexibility allowed us to apply that same model to meals for students out-of-school. To make this vision a reality, we needed three things: 1) a food vendor; 2) a fiscal sponsor; and 3) distribution sites. Francis Gouillart from Stock Pot Malden, a culinary kitchen incubator, was the ideal partner, building a team of brilliant chefs in partnership with food truck owner Lorena Lorenzet and firing up his kitchen to produce beautiful, colorful, and culturally-familiar meals for the community, all while remaining under the federal subsidy cost per meal. We joined forces with the YMCA of Greater Boston to facilitate the program and manage the USDA reimbursement, and we worked with community organizations to assist with distribution and marketing to the community while finding strategically-located distribution sites. At each site, thanks to the new flexibility from the USDA, students or their parents could pick up multiple days worth of fresh meals at once, and we immediately began receiving feedback about how much everyone loved the incredible food.

ADOPTION: Local Lunchbox quickly grew from hundreds to thousands of meals per week, and by the following year we had distributed over five million meals across a dozen retail restaurant locations and three dozen summer programs in Boston and across Massachusetts. This work drew the attention of the Obama Foundation, who worked with us to bring the Local Lunchbox model to thousands of students in dozens of sites across Chicago, where it is still going strong.