Easy, healthy meal kits for needy families:

Grocery Market Kit

What are Grocery Market Kits and why?

A Grocery Market Kit is a truly affordable family meal kit in a reusable bag that you can easily carry onto a bus, in your wheelchair, car, or on a walk home….

This meal kit can be bought with EBT cards (aka Food Stamps), and when possible is eligible for Double Up Food Bucks, coupons, and other ways to save. Grocery Market Box affordably and easily scales from meals for a family of four to feeding a family of eight or more adults and children.

Grocery Market Kits seek to additionally address the food waste from grocery stores, the donated raw ingredients to food banks, and the need for education and encouraging healthier eating habits to prevent and treat diseases such as Type II Diabetes, obesity, and others.

Grocery Market Kits additionally address the following:

• • accessibility and reading comprehension levels: each recipe/meal card will have 16 point font and be written at a 3rd grade level, with illustrations and videos
  • require minimal resources: each meal will be able to be cooked with one pot or pan, and usually with multiple methods (microwave, one pot or pans, substitutions etc) – no blenders, electric mixers or anything more complicated will be needed to prepare these meals
  • cost will be $5 per serving or less, this will help people budget their SNAP benefits and stretch them furthest
  • by helping make SNAP budgeting and meal planning stress-free, these kits address the fact that impoverished people are often stressed out and that stress affects the ability to reason and plan, adding to the cycle of poverty.

As research has repeatedly shown, placing a supermarket in a food desert only changes peoples’ transportation habits and does little to change their eating habits for the healthier. By providing healthy food options that increase health, and we hope that these meal kits are a productive step towards solving the problem of nutritional inequality.

Previously I had buy in from the St. Louis Science Center’s Youth Exploring Science to make video demonstrations produced by HECTV, and interest from the St. Louis Area Food Bank and St. Louis Public Schools.