Food Is Medicine, Delivered

FRESHFARM Announces a New Partnership!

FRESHFARM and Food & Friends are teaming up to enhance medically tailored grocery offerings with local, nutritious produce.

Food & Friends is a Washington, DC nonprofit that prepares and home-delivers 1.9 million medically tailored meals annually to several thousand households throughout the metropolitan area. Starting this spring, the Pop-Up Food Hub, FRESHFARM’s wholesale distribution program, is providing Food & Friends with local, high-quality produce for their medically tailored grocery program. 

Medically-Tailored, Locally Sourced Groceries 

This collaboration creates a pipeline directly from sustainable local farmers to the kitchen tables of nutritionally compromised individuals living with a serious or chronic illness served by Food & Friends. By working with FRESHFARM, Food & Friends is both shortening the supply chain and prioritizing local produce to provide the freshest, most nutrient-dense ingredients possible to support the health and well-being of those facing serious illnesses including HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, renal and heart disease, and many others.

“Everyone in Washington, DC, and the surrounding areas deserve access to fresh produce,” explains Caron Gremont, FRESHFARM Director of Food System Resiliency & Innovation. “Too often, though, our neighbors, especially those struggling with food security and chronic disease, don’t have access to the produce they need to thrive. This partnership gives these families access to the best our region has to offer. This partnership represents our commitment to ensuring everyone, regardless of zip code, has access to the healthy food they need.” 

Building Nonprofit Partnerships

Beyond the direct impact on their clients, Food & Friends sees this partnership as an opportunity to support FRESHFARM’s network of farmers and producers, in particular those traditionally excluded from agriculture: in 2023, 66% of the revenue generated by FRESHFARM’s wholesale program went to Black and Brown farmers. Furthermore, this partnership supports a collaborative ecosystem of nonprofits working at the intersection of food and health in the Washington, DC region. Working together, we can build a more equitable and resilient food system to works for everyone.