Today we’d like to introduce you to Annika Morgan and Josh Trautwein.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Annika and Josh. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Fresh Truck started while Josh was working as a health educator at the MGH Charlestown Healthcare Center. He kept hearing from his families that it was difficult to shop for healthy food — at that time, the only grocery store in the neighborhood was set to be shut down for a year-long renovation. It was this experience that inspired Fresh truck to rethink the traditional grocery store model, make it mobile and bring it to the people that need it the most.
Since our launch in 2013, we have grown to two buses, cultivated a citywide network of community health partners, and our neighborhoods have embraced us as their local grocery store. We’re hearing the stories of kids trying their first sweet potato and families cooking and sharing meals together. We have a big vision for the future of food and healthcare, and we are only just getting started.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We’re driving two school buses around Boston all year round, there have been a few bumps in the road, literally and figuratively. We have dealt with all of the typical challenges that come with trying to start something new. Especially around securing parking space and dealing with bus maintenance issues.
When we were just starting up there were some really long days when Josh was hustling hard to drive the bus and build the organization behind the scenes. There was a lot more work than a team of two could handle. But we have come a long way since then, in fact, as of last week, we are a proud team of 7. We are now focused on building the necessary infrastructure to support our growth over the next 12 months.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Fresh Truck – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Fresh Truck is a Boston nonprofit that operates two renovated school buses as mobile food markets, stocked with fresh fruit, vegetables, and healthy snacks; later on this summer, we will be expanding into prepared foods, meat and dairy. We partner with health centers and other community organizations to combine their services with access to affordable, healthy food. We are a cost-effective, high-impact food access solution to ensure families have access to fresh food in their neighborhood. We’re working toward making food a more integrated part of community health care.
Our mobile market resembles a traditional retail supermarket: the products are fresh, customers pick their own food and check out at the back. This model allows us to offer a wide, consistent variety of fresh, affordable –and in some cases free– food items for our most economically marginalized families.
We have partnered with a network of health centers, hospitals, insurers, housing developments, schools, and other population health stakeholders to develop a food prescription program called ‘FreshRx’. Through this program, any institution can underwrite the cost of healthy food for their families by pre-purchasing gift cards from us and distributing them to their population of families to shop at our market.
We also believe food access interventions must be paired with solutions that also address food culture, to sustainably shift how families shop, cook, and eat. So in addition to our Weekly Market program, we host nearly 130 Pop-up events in partnership with schools, housing agencies, and health centers. These programs create engaging touch points around food and healthy eating that supports our mission to revitalize food culture.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
In 2016, we experienced an overwhelming level of interest from our customers and partners, calling for us to expand our programming and retail offerings. This summer we will be renovating one of our mobile markets to become a full-service mobile grocery store. This renovation will allow us to offer meat, dairy, and prepared food items. These additions will enable us to further our mission by serving a wider range of families with a more comprehensive product offering. We will actually be unveiling the renovations at our first annual event on September 18th at Coppersmith.
The way we define success is a sustained shift in health outcomes across our most marginalized communities, but we know it takes years to change the way we shop, cook and eat. We look at impact as more than just pounds of food sold or the number of customers because it’s the data around health outcomes that will mean Fresh Truck is making a difference. It’s an ambitious goal, but we have our vision set on the long term and are working hard to develop our programs so we get there.
Looking forward over the next 12-months, Fresh Truck will be working with our network of large institutional healthcare partners to build an evaluation framework that pairs our transaction data with electronic health records, to monitor our impact on patient health outcomes.
Contact Info:
- Address: http://www.freshtruck.org/schedule/
- Website: www.freshtruck
- Phone: (774) 213-1936
- Email: annika@thefreshtruck.org
- Instagram: @thefreshtruck
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thefreshtruck/
- Twitter: @thefreshtruck
Image Credit:
Christina Allan, Annika Morgan, John Hopkins
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