Our Process

It all starts with the right relationships. We engage schools, communities, and partners and introduce them to our Brighter Bites model: produce distribution + nutrition education + a fun food experience.

From local farmers to leading university researchers, teachers to three-generation families, it takes teamwork to build a culture of health. Brighter Bites was built to scale, and we make it as easy as possible for communities.

Our produce suppliers donate fresh fruits and vegetables to our partnering food banks. Each week, our staff chooses 8 to 12 different types of produce from the huge warehouse coolers, and the food is specially tagged for Brighter Bites.

Working closely with leaders like Sysco not only helps us ensure that a wide variety of fruits and vegetables are available for Brighter Bites, but also that the food meets stringent standards of safety, quality, and traceable tastiness—no matter its shape or size!

Massive pallets teeming with bags and cases of fresh produce for Brighter Bites are loaded by warehouse staff into a large box truck. It is hard work: each truckload can feed hundreds of families.

Once the truck arrives at the site, it is typically unloaded into a gym or cafeteria. Unified in our bright red t-shirts, Brighter Bites staff and parent volunteers work as an assembly line to unpack and divide the variety of produce into bags.

Each family receives two bags: one for fruits, one for vegetables. Staples like potatoes, onions, carrots, and apples are typically included—along with unique seasonal picks that give families the chance to take home top crops like kale, kiwi, beets, plums, or rutabaga.

Also added into the bags are nutrition handbooks, tip sheets, and recipes that incorporate that week’s fresh produce. These bilingual materials are chock full of helpful info and advice, from kitchen safety to smarter snacking to making a healthier menu.

All educational materials are linked to children’s in-class nutrition lessons from CATCH and other evidence-based, coordinated school health programs that we help implement via our specially-trained staff.

Let the fun food experience begin! Our team prepares healthy, tasty “brighter bites” for families to sample, using one or more of the produce items being shared that week.

The recipe for that very demo also waits in the bags, ready to be taken home and tried out. Kids and their families taste new dips, soups, snacks, main dishes, and more—and they never leave without a stop at our happenin’ tattoo station.

When all is said and done, each family walks away with a pair of bags that contains 50 to 60 servings of fresh, seasonal produce, plus tips and tools for how to use it.

For one week for a family of four, that’s two extra servings of fruits and vegetables a day—at no extra cost to our participating families.

This process repeats for 16 weeks during the school year and 8 weeks during the summer. Our scalable co-op model allows us to bring Brighter Bites to more schools each season, creating a culture of health wherever we go.