food-access
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Nick Green and the trouble with perfect answers
A perfect SAT score helped him build a tutoring business. Building Thrive Market meant learning to live without an answer key.
Luke Saunders Put the Salad Where the Candy Bar Used to Be
A salesman tired of road food built a refrigerator in his apartment, planted it in a forlorn Chicago food court, and stayed to explain every salad. The machine was simple. The system behind it became the work of a decade.
Alex Tyink
Alex Tyink is the founder and CEO of Fork Farms, a Green Bay, Wisconsin food-access technology company behind the Flex Farm, a mobile indoor hydroponic system that grows up to 25 pounds of leafy greens a month in nine square feet. A trained opera singer from Appleton who studied voice at Northwestern, he traded a New York vocal-performance career for urban farming after volunteering at a Brooklyn rooftop garden in 2010. Fork Farms now works with more than 5,000 schools, hospitals, food pantries and companies across all 50 states and dozens of countries, and closed a $2 million Series A in 2021.
Jon Carter
Jon Carter is the CEO and Founder of Prado, an Austin-based technology platform that connects physicians, nutrition providers, and food businesses to make food function as medicine — unlocking $170 billion in pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars for medically tailored meals. Before Prado, Carter built a career spanning digital product leadership at Union Bank and Live Nation (where he ran eCommerce for 600+ artist brands including Jay-Z and Madonna), and CEO of Snap Kitchen. His father died from type 2 diabetes, and that loss transformed into a professional mission: eliminate the friction preventing food from operating as healthcare.
Daniel Wexler
Daniel Wexler is the co-founder and CEO of EatWell, a Boston public-benefit startup that turns dinner into a doctor's prescription. He maps food deserts the way logistics planners map warehouses, then ships affordable one-pot meal kits into the neighborhoods that grocery chains forgot. Trained in public health and behavioral economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Wexler reframed groceries as a 'Food is Medicine' tool that health insurers can prescribe to fight food insecurity and prevent diet-related disease while lowering healthcare spend.
Everytable
Everytable is a Los Angeles-based, mission-driven food company that makes fresh, nutritious meals affordable and accessible to everyone. Built around a central commissary kitchen and small-footprint stores, subscriptions, delivery and refrigerated SmartFridges, the company prices meals by neighborhood - keeping food affordable in communities often treated as food deserts. Founded in 2016 by former Wall Street trader Sam Polk and ex-private-equity executive David Foster, Everytable is a public benefit corporation pioneering a Social Equity Franchise Program to build generational wealth for entrepreneurs of color.
Fork Farms
Fork Farms is a mission-first agriculture technology company in Green Bay, Wisconsin that builds self-contained indoor vertical hydroponic systems - led by the Flex Farm - paired with a digital platform (Farmative) and K-12 curriculum. Its technology lets schools, hospitals, nonprofits, food pantries, businesses and homes grow hundreds of pounds of fresh produce per year on-site using a fraction of the water and land of conventional agriculture, turning food access into something anyone can do indoors.