Healthcare professionals will now get the opportunity to prescribe healthy fresh foods to select families in The Bronx through a new pilot program. Retail chain, Stop & Shop, The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM), About Fresh nonprofit, and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson announced the launch of a new program on July 12.

 

As previously reported, The Bronx has consistently ranked as the unhealthiest of New York State’s 62 counties, with high levels of obesity and diabetes prevalent across its neighborhoods. Meanwhile, food insecurity has long plagued the borough, a problem that was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

About Fresh is a Boston-based nonprofit, the aim of which is to allow healthcare professionals connect patients to healthy food. Their Fresh Connect program provides prepaid debit cards to families to buy fresh fruit and vegetables at local Stop & Shop stores.

 

The pilot program aims to ensure Bronx families have access to well-balanced, nutritional meals, and is being made possible through a $75,000 grant from Stop & Shop, the first major retailer in the country to partner with About Fresh.

 

During the announcement of the new program at the Stop & Shop store, located in the Bay Plaza Mall in Co-op City at 2136 Bartow Avenue, Gibson said, “Today we take a bold step in our overall efforts to address food insecurity across The Bronx and the City of New York.”

 

She added, “For too long our borough has been associated with everything bad:  highest rates of asthma, heart disease, obesity, so many preventable diseases that our residents and families live with today.”

 

Through the program, one hundred Bronx families will be provided with fresh produce for six months. The families will receive a $100 pre-paid, debit card for each month the pilot program lasts. The debit card can only be used to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables at any Stop & Shop location.

Jennifer Barr is director of external communication and community relations at Stop & Shop and said, “Stop & Shop is particularly focused on the issue of childhood hunger because we know that lack of food is very closely tied to lack of opportunity.”

 

The families participating in the initiative were identified by pediatricians and community health workers through Montefiore’s social needs screening. CHAM is the first hospital in the New York area to partner with Stop & Shop and offer the program to families in The Bronx. Stop & Shop has also donated $10,000 to the hospital to renovate a playroom for children with cancer.

 

Janira Moore who, along with her 15-month-old son, is a participant in the program, said, “There’s a lot of children with food insecurity that I personally know who have to rely on free lunch from the school system and bring that home sometimes in order to have their next meal.”

 

Moore added, “Fresh Connect allows people to have the opportunity to not have to choose between different foods or have to trade-off between different foods.”

A year ago, Stop & Shop successfully implemented the program in Massachusetts. Stop & Shop then expanded the program to all its 400-plus chain stores across New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York.

 

Josh Trautwein, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Connect, said, “This program is going to be so powerful from the standpoint of health equity. We know food is essential to our health from a healthcare transformation and pain innovation standpoint.” He added, “We know that it is driving an exorbitant amount of avoidable costs.”

 

Meanwhile, Gibson summed up the event, saying, “Every investment that we make in this grant is an investment in our children and when we invest in our children, we invest in their future.”

 

*Síle Moloney contributed to this story.