How this socially responsible business is transforming school lunch programs across the country to attack the obesity epidemic
Childhood obesity, which has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, breathing problems, some cancers, and poor self-esteem, is a particularly painful epidemic in our country. Cases of childhood obesity have tripled over the last 20 years, and according to the Center for Disease Control, approximately 17 percent of all children in the U.S. are obese.
A number of efforts are trying to stem the tide. First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" initiative hopes to solve childhood obesity within a generation by emphasizing pro-active solutions for eating right and staying active, but one socially responsible company is zeroing in on one of the main sources of poor nutrition: school lunches. Too many schools cannot afford to provide quality food for their students, so Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey, two former grad students from Berkeley's Haas School of Business, are bringing healthy and wholesome menus to schools around the country with their start-up, Revolution Foods.
Since launching in 2006, Revolution Foods, based in Oakland, Calif., has provided low-income schools and students with unprecedented access to delicious and nutritious food. The company has already served about 400 schools in Northern and Southern California, Colo., and Washington, D.C., with plans to expand to Houston and Newark, New Jersey.
We caught up with the two co-founders behind this socially responsible culinary revolution—Richmond, the company's CEO, and Tobey, the CIO—to discuss how they built their program from the ground up, the challenges of operating within a strict budget, and how the company balances social responsiblity with practicality.
Why did you choose to revolutionize school food?
Kristin Richmond: We both had a huge passion for food. It's sort of like when all of your dreams come together, when you love a couple of things—for me, it was education reform, building better schools, creating access for students and primarily underserved communities—and then it was also food. I grew up on a cattle ranch in Texas, so it's been something that's been apart of me since day one. Food, where food comes from, and the importance of that.
Growing up, my mother always gave us vegetables, always gave us fruit and a balanced meal, and while it was always super simple, we were just taught to eat in a balanced fashion. It really impacted our strength and how well we were growing and how much energy we had to do our homework—all of those things. I grew up believing that, and then my experience working in schools, I saw these huge differences. I started a school in Kenya, and in Kenya, it's a different problem: It's malnourishment, but without food period. The ones that came with lunches had a certain level of focus at the school when I was teaching them, and ones that came with a slice of bread with margarine on top could barely keep their eyes open at the end of the school day.
Kirsten Tobey: I'd also done a lot of work in college working with kids to teach them nutrition education through gardening and connecting kids with where food comes from. We just saw this huge gap that there are a lot of amazing entrepreneurs working on teacher recruitment and academic success and college readiness and so many different things, but we didn't see anybody doing anything about food. I think we both felt this real disconnect out in the world between what we know is good for kids and making the connection to school food. If you can provide really good food for kids at school, you actually really do impact their academic success and their ability to learn and their ability to pay attention in class.
Richmond: We'd both been in education from different angles—Kirsten was a teacher, and I was primarily in operations and school building and talent—but both of us had had the same story where we had spent time in schools and kept hearing these teachers saying, "I'm teaching my kids one thing about how to take care of their bodies and how important it is to fuel their bodies and their minds, and how that correlates to test scores and focus in class and energy on the basketball court, whatever it might be. But then I go down to the lunch room and I just feed them junk food—I'm feeding them Hot Pockets and Cheetos as my meal every day at school, and I feel like a hypocrite."
For Kirsten and for me, we believe that the inputs into your students' bodies and minds equal the outputs of a great education opportunity for students. For us, it was an amazing chance to transform that access for students, and frankly, it really wasn't being done on a scalable level, particularly in low-income schools. That's what really catalyzed our movement.
How difficult was it to get the program up and running?
Tobey: It took a lot of work. We decided in order to get the program up and running, what we really needed to do was secure the financing. We focused a lot of our efforts during the second year on looking for investors who were intersted in helping us start this up, because it's a pretty capital-intensive business. In order to get things up and running, we needed to have a truck, we needed to have a culiinary center where we could prepare the meals, and we had to hire a team of people to help us with the cooking and packing and delivery of the meals.
Richmond: There was just so many pieces. We had to find school partners—which wasn't the hard part, that was the easy part because we had so many schools that wanted this change—but then we had to find supply chain partners, which was quite challenging and remains challenging because we're constantly striving for high quality and low cost.
Tobey: We started up a pilot program [in Oakland, Calif.] in order to help demonstrate what we were trying to do, but also to have something to show investors. We actually partnered with the regional leadership team of Whole Foods at the time. In the pilot stage, we didn't have any facilities to work out of, so Whole Foods actually made the meals for us. We would go out, pick up the meals, bring them to a lighthouse community/charter school here in Oakland, and serve the meals to the kids ourselves.
We found it was a great pilot program, but what we really wanted to do was decide our own menus and make the food exactly how we wanted to. So we raised a C round of funding from a capital fund called the Bay Area Equity Fund—they're now called DBL Investors. We had this very small pilot program and a business plan and they said, "We're going to give you the capital that it's going to take." In the first year, we ended up serving 1,000 meals per day to a handful of schools here in the Bay Area.
How has your company grown since launching?
Tobey: We started with just the two of us. In our first full year, we had six employees, and now we have just about 500. From a revenue level, we were at about a half million dollars in our first year and we're hoping to finish this year close to the $30 million mark. We've grown quite a bit revenue-wise, and then we've grown from about 1,000 meals a day in our first year to this year, where we were serving about 70,000 meals per day. This coming school year, we're slated to do 100,000 school meals per day.
