The Entrepreneur Working to Improve Nutritious Food Access
At least once a week you'll find Kristin Groos Richmond deep in conversation—with either students, parents, a school leader, a superintendent, or even a city mayor. They will be talking about food. Richmond will be asking questions and listening intently. She'll be looking to better understand the nutrition needs of that particular community, she says, and to discover the ways she and her team "can continue to address quality food access for all kids and families."
Community and nutrition are the core of Richmond's work. In 2006 she and Kirsten Saenz Tobey co-founded Revolution Foods, a B Corporation that designs, produces, and delivers nutritious, affordable meals and snacks to families and students across the United States. The food is high quality—whole grains, hormone-free dairy, locally-sourced fruit and vegetables, lean USDA high grade protein—kid-inspired, and chef-crafted, catering to the culinary needs and desires of each region it serves. At a school in New Orleans you'll find fresh Jambalaya and Red Beans and Rice on the menu, while in Texas the Pepper Jack Burger and classic Chef's Salad may be the popular items. "We pride ourselves on culturally relevant meals," says Richmond, who believes that the localized effort comes from the student, family, and leadership insight she and her team consistently garner. "It's humbling and exhilarating.”
In its nearly fifteen years in existence Revolution Foods has grown to work with more than 2500 schools and community sites, delivering 2 million meals a week across the country. The company also designs after-school and community meal programs and provides hands-on nutrition education to students outside the cafeteria. The company has seen a direct correlation between the nutrition they provide and increased academic achievement. Students at schools that contract with a healthier school-lunch provider perform better on tests, according to a 2018 paper published by UC Berkeley. (Revolution Foods was ranked number one in this study.) Furthermore, a recent impact assessment conducted by KKS Advisors on behalf of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation confirmed a 13.1 percent improvement in English Language Arts test results by students whose schools partnered with Revolution Foods.
Richmond, who is CEO and who previously co-founded a school in Kenya and worked in the investment banking sector, says she wants Revolution Foods to not only deliver quality nutrition, but to ultimately raise the standard of healthy food and to holistically and positively impact communities. "It is also about continuing to equip parents, students, and teachers with the resources they need to encourage positive nutrition outside the lunch line."
A Q&A with Kristin Richmond
What led you to found Revolution Foods?
I started my career in finance but several years later moved overseas to Kenya to help start a school in Nairobi. I had an amazing chance to support educators in starting a school for children with learning differences. One of my jobs eventually became teaching. In the classroom, I saw firsthand the link between healthy students and nutrition, particularly in a child’s ability to be engaged in class, attentive, and set up for success both inside and outside the classroom. Through the experience of teaching and building a school, it became solidified in my mind that great nutrition is a key lever for setting youth up for success.
Why did you start Revolution Foods as a business rather than a non-profit?
My co-founder Kirsten Tobey and I saw the criticality of the impact link between nutrition and academic success. We also looked at the competitive landscape of school and community program meals. We were looking at a very large market at between $15 billion and $20 billion. What we saw was that there weren't many solutions for well-crafted, nutritious, affordable meal products for students in schools. We saw a large business opportunity to start a company that would provide this offering. We call our products “kid-inspired, chef-crafted,” clean-label meals for schools and families around the country. We saw a wonderful opportunity to merge both impact and business to create what would become Revolution Foods.
I think that all entrepreneurs have a sense of whether they're starting something smaller and local versus starting something that they have ambitions to scale nationally or globally. We were definitely in the latter category. Our feeling was that healthy food access was a national issue. There are so many communities and schools that deserve better nutrition for their students, so we wanted to set something up quickly. Our instinct was that starting a for-profit, given the business opportunity and the ability to raise capital to scale once we had the model together, would be the best way to have systems changing impact and grow the most successful company.
Can you walk us through a typical day?
No two days are the same. A lot of my focus is on setting a vision and motivating people toward that vision, as well as recruiting incredible talent and giving my teammates everything they need to succeed.
Revolution Foods focuses a great deal on deep community connections. You'll see me once a week meeting with students, school leaders, sometimes with superintendents, mayors, and families to understand how we are doing and what are the unmet needs we can address to drive healthy food access.
Our schools are our heart and soul. We also serve after-school and pre-K programs, and we're starting to look at other vulnerable populations, such as the senior community. I am thinking a lot about who we are serving, how can we have the most impact and making sure we are financially healthy and sustainable as a company. We do a lot of work on optimization internally—ensuring we have the right processes in place and that we are constantly learning, reflecting, and improving.
How do you handle the politics side of your business?
School food is a politicized issue; however, I don't think anyone at this point is debating the importance of nutrition and setting students up for success. We are fortunate to now have data linking our nutrition approach to academic outcomes. We recently received an impact study by KKS Advisors, commissioned by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that showed schools that served Revolution Foods saw a 13 percent improvement in English Language Arts (ELA) test results versus similar control schools across Massachusetts, New York, and Louisiana. It becomes a lot easier to have conversations with majors, school leaders, or parents when you have data linking the investment in great nutrition for communities to outcomes, regardless of the politics.
How do you define great nutrition?
We have taken a simple approach. It's what we call “real food.” It's no artificial anything. The way we design our plates from a nutrition standpoint includes fresh fruits, lots of veggies, lean proteins, and vegetarian options where desired. We look at the nutritional composition and also at the love of our food, because we are parents too. It doesn't mean much to have a healthy meal if your child or student isn't going to eat it. We spend a ton of time focusing on: What do students want to see in their meals? How do they want to be involved in designing our meals? What culturally relevant menu items might we be missing in different areas of the country? We marry the nutrition and ingredients quality with what we call “kid-inspired, chef-crafted” design approach to ensure every child loves and benefits from the food they eat.
How do you engage the customers—the children—in the schools?
A few years ago, we started an initiative called Project Crave. Through this program, we survey thousands of students across the country every month, securing their feedback on taste, texture, appearance, as well as overall feedback on menu items and which new meals we may be missing. We look at what's going well and what's not going well. We don't want to keep something on the menu that is not resonating with our students. We utilize a scale of one to five and ask our students to rank our menu items based on the aforementioned criteria. Our regional chefs then take that feedback to our product development kitchen and craft culturally relevant, delicious and nutritious menus.
On the broader scale of creating life-long healthy eaters, we partner with several non-profit programs. Together with best-in-class community partners such as FoodCorps, Stephen and Ayesha Curry’s Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, and Wellness in the Schools (WITS), Revolution Foods equips community members with valuable tools and resources to continue positive nutrition education outside of school.
Revolution Foods also cares about locally sourced produce and food waste.
We recognize, as the country is becoming more aware, that we as a society throw out so much food. (More than 30 percent of the food supply chain is wasted, to be more precise.) There are a couple of things we do at Revolution Foods to help alleviate this issue: We prioritize crafting menus that students enjoy. We also monitor consumption and order rates correlated to the specific menus so that we can help schools better manage their food waste. Seventy-five percent of our student body qualifies for free and reduced lunch. That means the meals we serve—breakfast, lunch, snack, and supper—are often the only meals students are able to rely on during the day. We want to provide enough great food to ensure students are nourished and avoid wasting food along the way so that we can continue to invest in the great quality we promise .
Have you seen shift in conversation around mealtime as part of a child's day?
There is more awareness. Recently there was a profound article in The New York Times about the military and their struggle with the obesity epidemic. When we started Revolution Foods, there was an acute awareness of diabetes and other nutrition-related diseases—the number of children affected by these diseases has unfortunately sky-rocketed. We know today that close to 50 percent of the children in the communities we're serving will be impacted by type 2 diabetes. As such, principals and school leaders are very focused on this issue and can now review more data on the correlation between nutrition and academic outcomes. As a result, the case for investment in this area has gotten stronger.
You are thinking a great deal about social impact. Have you seen a correlation between the financial performance of your company and the social and environmental impact that it has generated?
There is a saying that I often use, which reflects Revolution Foods’ commitment to both growth and impact: Our values, meaning our impact values and our purpose-driven values, connect directly to our value, meaning our financial value. I use that statement—our values create our value—because I truly believe that. Our differentiators of clean-label supply chain and kid-inspired, chef-crafted approach have actually allowed us to be successful in selling our products into communities. We work with so many incredible Food Service Directors within school systems who are looking for a partner to complement the work they are doing. They're very committed to offering quality and innovative programs for their students, and there are significant gaps they need filled by a partner like Revolution Foods. I think our value, our ability to sell, our ability to grow, and our ability to retain our customers have been driven by our commitment to quality, which is rooted in our mission as a company.
The same thing happens with job creation. We are very committed to creating careers for people in the communities we serve. We believe if you are hiring moms, dads, grandpas, grandmas, aunts, uncles of the students that you are serving, you're going to have a much better product. I care so much about what I'm serving my kids as a mom and so does every family member, so your product is going to be better, your retention is going to be better, and the overall morale and commitment of the company is going to be better as a result of that job creation strategy.
Are there other ways you engage your employees and help them be a part of the mission of the company?
We do. As briefly mentioned earlier, Stephen and Ayesha Curry have a phenomenal foundation in the Bay Area called the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, which is committed to solving the food access gap for families. We spent our summer working with the foundation, serving the Oakland Town Camps. We worked in conjunction with the foundation to serve hot breakfast, healthy lunch, and a once-a-week community family supper. This was an example of our entire team helping to serve the community and doing so with the Curry Foundation, which was super exciting and motivating. This partnership really supported our mission of transforming citywide wellness because it was a community effort and one right here in our own backyard. These are the types of community initiatives that our entire team, from the CEO, to prep chef, to driver, to dishwasher, to account manager, to finance or HR administrator, is proud and excited to support.
How does the purpose in your work drive you as an entrepreneur?
I have been building Revolution Foods for almost fifteen years now, so it truly is part of my DNA. My children were born while starting and building the company as an entrepreneur, so my kids and family are just as committed to Revolution Foods as I am. Being able to be proud of what I'm doing as a parent, a community member, and a CEO is a real honor. I feel it constantly. Having said this, it's not always a field of roses. You go through a lot of challenges when you're trying to drive systems change. You often fall and have to get back up – it's incredibly humbling. The purpose, the bigger belief in what we're doing, has certainly fueled me to stay in the game and continue to work humbly to reflect and learn every day. For me, it always comes back to listening to the community we’re serving and continuing to improve my ability to be a servant leader at every step in the process.
Where do you see Revolution Foods in ten years?
We are in a space where there is so much more opportunity for systems-changing work to happen. I have talked about this concept of systems change, of creating a new standard of respect and quality for the communities we serve; I believe that continuing to expand our impact and to improve our product offering can better serve schools and communities holistically. It is also about continuing to equip parents, students, and teachers with the resources they need to encourage positive nutrition outside the lunch line. We are looking at other adjacencies to increase our reach: How can we use our capabilities as a product design, fresh food manufacturing company, a dedicated community partner, and a social impact organization to help alleviate the issue of healthy food access in other areas? Most importantly, when I take my CEO hat off and put my mom and community member hat on, I hope to see the industry continue to react, respond and generate higher wellness standards for the communities we serve and the entire nation.
To learn more about Revolution Foods visit: Revolutionfoods.com.
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