Food Forward’s Fresh Approach: Can Meal Boxes Improve Food Security for Low-Income Communities Living in Healthy Food Priority Areas?

Food security continues to be an issue in the United States, especially in urban healthy food priority areas. Most interventions prioritize physical and economic access, just one of the four pillars of food security. We present the beginnings of a framework to help qualitatively assess an intervention’s contributions to various dimensions and sub-dimensions of food security and summarize the contributions of dominant interventions observed in the literature. We have followed Food Forward, a meal box social enterprise, since its conception in 2021. As a case study, we apply the framework and find that meal boxes have the potential to comprehensively address all dimensions of food security at the household level. Community involvement in strategic planning and operations can improve food utilization, and a financially sustainable social enterprise model can facilitate access, availability, and utilization stability. Future research is needed to develop the framework further by adding indicators to assess individual and collective contributions of community-based interventions to household food security. Longitudinal studies for innovative social business models for meal boxes are necessary to assess their contribution to the stability dimension of household food security.