Stop & Shop is partnering with About Fresh to help 100 Bronx families access produce.
Photo courtesy Stop & Shop
A pilot program in the Bronx is testing out what it would be like if doctors could prescribe produce to patients in the city’s unhealthiest borough.
At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Stop & Shop, Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM), the About Fresh company and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson were scheduled to announce the launch of the program at the 2136 Bartow Ave. Stop & Shop in the Bay Plaza Mall in Co-op City.
Fresh Connect, an About Fresh program, is launching in New York state for the first time through a Bronx pilot that will provide produce to 100 families for six months.
The select families will receive pre-paid $100 debit cards each month of the pilot that can only buy fresh fruit and vegetables at any Stop & Shop grocery store, Stop & Shop spokesperson Daniel Wolk and Josh Trautwein, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Connect, told the Bronx Times.
The “food prescription program” empowers people to buy the foods they need to be healthy through money and flexibility, Wolk said.
Participants were identified by pediatricians and Community Health Workers through Montefiore’s social needs screening, which the medical center conducts at its primary care locations, or through CHAM’s Adolescent Eating Disorder Group.
The Fresh Connect food prescription program began as part of About Fresh’s Fresh Truck mobile food market with paper coupons that could be used at the truck, Trautwein told the Bronx Times. In 2018, the company decided to develop a new payment method — the pre-paid debit cards — that could function across a network of retailers.
The program has two parts: stores that accept the debit cards and organizations willing to fund them.
That vision became a reality with a December 2021 pilot at a Stop & Shop store in Massachusetts that proved to be successful. In January 2022, Stop & Shop implemented…
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