When I retired from Frito-Lay last year, a new team called "Food for Good" was being formed as part of Frito-Lay/PepsiCo's Performance with Purpose goals. The team’s objective was to identify what the company could do to improve the nutrition of lower-income families, while helping to create jobs. To me, doing either one was an admirable goal, but to try to both improve nutrition and create jobs seemed like an almost insurmountable challenge.
This week, I caught up with Amy Chen, Food for Good’s project manager, to find out her team’s progress. (Amy is pictured here with Atsu Atakpa, Food for Good Farm Team Leader, and Michael Sorrell, President of Paul Quinn College.) I was pleased to learn from Amy that they have two very promising projects underway:
Summer Mobile Meals: In conjunction with Central Dallas Ministries and AmeriCorps, last summer Amy’s team launched a mobile program to deliver meals to lower-income school-age children. Many children who qualify for government-financed breakfast and lunch programs during the school year don’t have access to meals during the summer. The problem isn’t that the food is unavailable; rather, it requires children to travel to locations like their local YMCA. In most cases, that’s not possible because parents work and won’t allow their kids to travel alone for safety reasons.
Amy and her team came up with a brilliant-yet-simple solution: bring meals to children, sort of like an ice-cream truck, but with nutritious meals on board. Frito-Lay is an expert in food distribution, delivering snacks to more than 300,000 stores a week as part of our day-to-day business. So the Food for Good team knew they could get the food to apartment buildings and other locations with high concentrations of school-age children. But, Amy told me, they wondered, “If we deliver the meals, will the kids show up?”
It turned out the answer was “yes!” Last summer, the team members tested their idea in Dallas, and kids turned out in droves. In fact, by the end of the summer, they had delivered 50,000 breakfasts and snacks.
Building on that success, the team is expanding this program to provide more than 250,000 meals at 100 community sites in Dallas this summer. AmeriCorps members support the program, earning a small salary while learning practical skills to build their resumes and transition into rewarding careers. A mobile meals program is also being tested in Chicago this summer with the long-term goal of establishing a national network.
Food for Good Farm: Also this summer, the team kicked off the Food for Good Farm at Paul Quinn College in Dallas. They've converted the school’s former football field into a productive farm growing fruits and vegetables, where college students are now working. The objective is to develop a business that gives students real-world entrepreneurial experience by selling vegetables to local restaurants and at community produce stands. This also gives residents of lower-income areas access to nutritious food that they often can’t otherwise find in their neighborhoods.
After talking to Amy, I’m very impressed with Food for Good’s progress over the last year. The initiative is still in its infancy, and I don't want to overstate the accomplishments. Yet I can see that long-term, this promises to be true fulfillment of PepsiCo's "Performance with Purpose."
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