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 technology to accept Fresh Connect debit cards at more than 100 stores in Eastern Massachusetts.
Soon after, the technology was implemented in all of the grocery chain’s 400-plus stores, which are spread across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
But even with the stores accepting the cards everywhere, someone needs to fund them. While Stop & Shop is making the six-month Bronx pilot program possible with a $75,000 grant, it’s actually the first time the grocery chain is funding the cards.
Typically, health plans, health care providers and community based organizations pay for the pre-paid cards, Trautwein said.
While Fresh Connect debit cards are now accepted in all 50 states at all Giant Food, Albertsons, Kroger and Walmart stores, as well as a smaller network of independent retailers and farmers markets, Trautwein said, the program is only currently funded in Massachusetts, Connecticut, West Virginia, Indiana, Idaho, Washington, D.C., Maryland and Oregon. It will launch in four more states this summer, he added.
The CEO said his team has “every intention” of expanding Fresh Connect in New York City and that they are “really energized by all the momentum around food and medicine here.”
“I’m a brand new resident to New York City and it’s super important to me,” said Trautwein, who lives in Brooklyn. “I’m putting energy and effort into investing into my new community.”
It’s fitting that the program, which is meant to treat food insecurity, is beginning its NYC run in the Bronx. The borough is known for ranking as the unhealthiest county in New York state year after year, which it did again in 2023.
NYC Community Health Survey responses from 2017 show that neighborhoods in the South Bronx had the second-highest percentage of residents in all of New York City who had not eaten a serving of fruits and vegetables the day prior, behind only a Queens district. As a whole, the Bronx had the highest rate of this measure out of all the boroughs, at 17.9%.
Citywide, a higher percentage of Black and Latino people — at 16.9% and 15.8%, respectively — had not eaten a serving of fruit/vegetables, compared to 7% of their white counterparts.
According to Feeding America, 18.5% of Bronxites were food insecure in 2018, and, according to City Harvest, visits to New York City food pantries and soup kitchens were up 69% in 2022 compared to 2019, with food prices soaring due to inflation.
“We are trying to make a positive impact in a borough that really needs to support families dealing with hunger,” Wolk told the Bronx Times.
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Reach Aliya Schneider at aschneider@schnepsmedia.com or (718) 260-4597. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
