He left the trading desk to ask a stubborn question: why is the worst food in the building served to the kids?
Who he is, right now
Rhys Powell runs Red Rabbit, the country's premier Black-owned K-12 school food management company. The numbers he watches are not stock tickers anymore. They are participation rates - how many kids actually pick up a tray and eat. On a given school day his chefs send out roughly 40,000 made-from-scratch meals to about 20,000 students across some 150 schools in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The pitch is simple and a little subversive. Most school food arrives frozen, gets reheated, and gets thrown away. Red Rabbit cooks. Professional chefs, fresh ingredients, daily. And the menu is built to look like the kids it feeds - suya chicken and jollof rice in a Brooklyn charter school, not a mystery rectangle of pizza.
It is a roughly $20-million-a-year operation now, and Powell still talks about it the way he did when it was a man with a van and a hunch. The scale impresses people. He is more interested in whether the food is good - actually good, the kind a kid would choose - because a healthy meal a child refuses to eat is just expensive compost.
Powell calls it a social-justice company that happens to run on the playbook of a for-profit business. The cafeteria, in his telling, is one of the few places a school can fight chronic absenteeism with something as ordinary as a good lunch. Feed a kid food that respects them, and they show up.
That word - respects - is doing a lot of work. Red Rabbit is the country's premier Black-owned K-12 school food management company, and most of the students it feeds are Black and Hispanic. The menu reflects that on purpose. Powell talks about culturally relevant meals not as a marketing flourish but as a form of recognition: a child who sees their grandmother's cooking in the lunch line gets a quiet message that they belong here. That is harder to engineer than it sounds, and it is the part of the business he refuses to outsource to a freezer.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The before
He grew up in the Bahamas, in a place where community was not a brand value but the actual weather of daily life. At 17 he moved to the United States and went to MIT, finishing in 2000 with a degree in computer science and engineering. The expected next move followed: finance. He traded equities in Manhattan, first at Spectrum Capital Partners, then at Carlin Financial Group.
It looked like a finished story. It was a setup.
A friend was struggling to find healthy food for his four-year-old and asked Rhys for help. The two of them went looking and kept coming up empty. There was no convenient, decent, healthy option for a kid. To a former trader, an empty shelf where demand should be is not a disappointment. It is a market. In 2005 he left Wall Street and started Red Rabbit, originally pitched as New York City's first healthy school food provider.
The early days carried the usual tuition. He once spent real money on red-topped IKEA tables to make the brand pop, then ended up selling them on the sidewalk. Lesson filed under: discipline.
What he had that most first-time food entrepreneurs do not was an engineer's head and a trader's nerve. MIT taught him to break a messy problem into systems. Wall Street taught him to act on conviction while the price was still moving. A school lunch program is, underneath the trays, a logistics problem of brutal precision - thousands of meals, dozens of buildings, immovable bell schedules, zero tolerance for a late delivery. It turns out the skills transfer.
Field notes
At a South Bronx charter school full of English-language learners, cafeteria participation went from 15 students to more than 350 - roughly 95% adoption. A lunchroom became a reason to come to school.
Powell told chef Ola Wadley to cook the food she wished she'd had in her own grade-school cafeteria. Out came suya chicken and jollof rice. Heritage on a tray.
Thousands of meals went over during production. He stayed calm - a composure he credits to his mother - coordinated a recovery, and still made every school delivery. Not one was missed.
The reframe
For years the company was, on paper, a food-service vendor with an unusually good kitchen. Then Powell started looking at schools for his own children, and what he saw stopped him. He could not believe how segregated New York's schools still were - this, as the Black Lives Matter movement was pushing everyone to examine their own role in the system. Something shifted. As he put it: "It clicked for me. Our day-to-day work isn't just about the now; it's part of a bigger picture."
From then on Red Rabbit described itself plainly as a social-justice company - one uplifting Black and Brown children in public schools with chef-prepared, culturally relevant meals served in affirming spaces. The kitchen did not change. The story it was telling did. Powell had stopped selling lunches and started selling dignity, with lunch as the delivery mechanism.
He is careful, though, not to let the mission soften the math. He insists on running the operation like a real business - the for-profit playbook applied to public good - because a company that goes broke helps no one. Impact over profit, but profit enough to keep the impact coming. That tension is the whole game, and he seems to enjoy it.
The receipts
In his own words
"We are a young, entrepreneurial company that is trying to improve the food system in America, one community at a time."
"It clicked for me. Our day-to-day work isn't just about the now; it's part of a bigger picture."
"Plan for perpetuity."
An entire lifetime, he says, is too short to understand all the amazing things the world has to offer - so he stays humble and keeps learning.
The aim isn't just lunch. It's dismantling the cultural hierarchy that lingers in America - so every child feels represented and valued, starting with what's on the tray.
Asides
Raised in the Bahamas, moved to the U.S. at 17 for MIT. Community came first; it still does.
He read order books before he read menus. The trader's instinct for an unmet demand is exactly what started the company.
Draws on Toni Morrison and scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. - claiming the margins as the center.
The composure he leans on in a crisis, he says, came straight from his mother. It has paid for itself more than once.
"Plan for perpetuity" isn't a slogan on a wall. It's why he'd rather grow a school at a time than chase a headline.
His own framing of the whole project: a young, entrepreneurial company trying to improve the food system in America, one community at a time.
Watch
Rhys Powell on building Red Rabbit, founder to founder.
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