Freshbag: Bringing Fresh Food To Urban Communities

“As part of our school­ing, we were sent into the [Cleveland] com­mu­nity to iden­tify the biggest health prob­lems,” Wong told The Huffington Post in a phone inter­view. “These are economically-depressed areas, and we’d go into schools and ask stu­dents how many of them had fam­ily mem­bers with dia­betes, and every hand would go up.”

Since there were parks and gyms avail­able to the stu­dents he was try­ing to help, Wong said he decided to focus on the food side of the diet-and-exercise path to bet­ter health. He then quickly iden­ti­fied the three main road­blocks to healthy eat­ing: cost, time and access.

“If both par­ents are work­ing, we real­ized that it falls on mom or dad to go shop­ping for good food — which isn’t often avail­able nearby — or on a kid to actu­ally make that push,” he said. “So if we reduce the time and cre­ate options at the same time, we can start address­ing these problems.”

Of course, deliv­er­ing food is not an espe­cially novel idea. From HomeGrocer to FreshDirect, there have been a whole host of home-delivery ser­vices. But Wong, who is the freshbag’s chief exec­u­tive, said he and the company’s pres­i­dent, Max Wilberding, real­ized that they don’t actu­ally need to deliver to cus­tomers’ homes.

Instead, they focused on cen­tral­ized deliv­ery loca­tions as a means of man­ag­ing the mas­sive over­head that con­sis­tently con­tributed to the demise of many of the early gro­cery deliv­ery operations.

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