The Rhode Island brand that made the lunch bag something you actually look forward to.
For most of retail history, the lunch bag was an afterthought - a nylon sack shoved to the back of a desk drawer. Fit & Fresh built a business on a simple bet: that the thing you carry your food in could be as considered as the food itself. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, the company designs insulated lunch bags, meal-prep kits, portion-control containers, bento boxes and reusable ice packs for people who want to eat well without hauling around something ugly.
The company describes its aim plainly - to help people, and especially women, look and feel their best by making healthy eating on the go simple and enjoyable. That framing runs through everything from the pattern on a bag to the number of containers that clip into a gym kit. Lunch, in the Fit & Fresh telling, should be something you anticipate rather than endure.
What began as MEDport LLC, a maker of healthcare and consumer products, found its identity in a single brand. The Fit & Fresh line launched in 2006 and grew steadily enough that, by 2015, the parent company took the brand's name for its own. Today the products sit in more than 30,000 retail doors nationwide and carry over 100,000 five-star reviews between them.
Fit & Fresh designs first for women and families - the parent packing a kid's bento box, the office worker who wants a bag that matches the rest of what they carry, the person prepping five days of meals on a Sunday night. The Jaxx line extends that to gym-goers and meal-preppers who need portion control and a shaker bottle in one insulated bag.
The problems it solves are ordinary and stubborn: food that warms up by noon, containers that leak, portions that creep, and gear that looks like an afterthought. The fix is a system - bag, containers and reusable ice pack designed to work together - rather than a pile of mismatched parts.
Figures reflect company statements; bar widths are illustrative.
From a single fashionable bag to a family of sub-brands - Fit & Fresh, Jaxx, Fit & Healthy, Medport, Fresh Starts and Gatherings.
Patterned, insulated bags for work, school and office that keep food cold and look good doing it.
Cooler bags bundled with BPA-free portion-control containers, reusable ice packs and shaker bottles for the gym crowd.
Multi-flex bento boxes with ice packs that clip under the lid - no loose parts rattling around.
Slim, reusable cool packs sized to fit the brand's bags and containers.
Cold food storage and portion-control containers, including glass and BPA-free plastic.
A brand-collaboration line of lunch and food-carry accessories.
Plenty of companies sell coolers and containers. Fit & Fresh's edge is that it treated "fashionable lunch" as a category rather than a product - and got there early, in 2006. The design team leans on continuous research, speaking with thousands of women a year and following fashion trends and industry shows to produce exclusive patterns.
The competitive set - PackIt, Bentgo, Rubbermaid, Yeti on coolers, plus store brands - largely sells function or sells style. Fit & Fresh's pitch is that you don't have to choose, and that a bag, its containers and its ice pack should be designed as one system.
Fit & Fresh runs a hybrid consumer-goods model. Wholesale distribution puts products in more than 30,000 retail doors - mass, grocery, office and specialty retailers, plus marketplaces like Amazon, Target and Office Depot. Alongside that sits a direct-to-consumer storefront on Shopify Plus at fit-fresh.com.
Revenue comes from designing, sourcing and selling branded lunch bags, meal-prep kits, containers and accessories across its family of sub-brands - the same customer served in the aisle and online.
MEDport introduces Fit & Fresh and helps create the fashionable-lunch category.
Insulated kits with portion-control containers reach gym-goers and meal-preppers through Amazon and mass retail.
The Indianapolis private-equity firm partners with management to acquire MEDport LLC and renames it Fit & Fresh, Inc.
New-season lunch bags, kits and kids' products roll out on the Shopify Plus store.
Where Fit & Fresh concentrates its expertise is narrow and deep: product design and development for carrying food and drink. That means pattern and print design, licensing and brand collaborations, insulation and portion engineering, and the sourcing and manufacturing to make it at retail scale. The company operates at the intersection of apparel-adjacent fashion sensibility and hard-goods manufacturing.
In the broader market, it sits inside consumer products and retail - a mid-sized specialist rather than a mass conglomerate. Backed since 2015 by private-equity firm CID Capital, it competes on brand and design in a category crowded with commodity coolers and containers. The durable advantage is the one that is hardest to copy: a decade-plus head start and a library of five-star reviews doing quiet, continuous selling.
Fashionable, insulated lunch bags, meal-prep kits, portion-control and food-storage containers, bento boxes and reusable ice packs for carrying healthy food and drinks on the go.
Providence, Rhode Island, United States, with roughly 53 employees.
Yes. The company was originally MEDport LLC and was renamed Fit & Fresh, Inc. in 2015 to reflect the strength of its flagship brand.
Directly at fit-fresh.com and through 30,000+ retail doors including Amazon, Target and Office Depot.
Jaxx by Fit & Fresh is a meal-prep range bundling insulated bags with BPA-free portion-control containers, reusable ice packs and shaker bottles aimed at fitness and meal-prep customers.
Watch: search Fit & Fresh Jaxx meal-prep reviews and lunch bag product demos on YouTube.