A letter to our Austin friends, supporters, volunteers, and partners

After ten meaningful years, Brighter Bites’ Austin program closed in December 2025. This difficult decision follows the elimination of SNAP-Ed funding this summer, which resulted in a significant national funding loss and required us to scale back programming to ensure long-term sustainability.

While Brighter Bites has scaled successfully across many cities and states, our operational model and related costs are not consistent across all our service cities. In Austin, unlike in other cities, we were unable to secure a food bank partner to assist us with produce procurement, transportation, or delivery, despite many years of efforts toward relationship-building. As a result, Brighter Bites Austin had to pay for-profit produce partners to assist us with these essential programmatic components. Because of this, it was three times more expensive for us to operate in Austin than in our other Texas cities.

Stable, significant government funding allowed us to shoulder these higher costs for many years. When they were eliminated, choosing to maintain our operations there would have meant serving three times fewer families overall, and that didn’t feel like an equitable path.

We share your concern about the impacts this decision had on the students and families we were committed to serving, as well as on our valued team members, who gave their time, energy, and expertise to advance our mission locally. We are doing everything we can to ensure resilience in the face of future unexpected losses.

We are deeply grateful to the Austin families, schools, partners, volunteers, and staff who made this program so special. The memories, relationships, and moments of joy we shared will always be part of the Brighter Bites story.

Thank you, Austin, for an incredible decade of impact.