Sweetgreen And FoodCorps Partner To Reimagine The American School Cafeteria Experience

By Nicole Rasul, Forbes 

Sweetgreen, a fast-casual restaurant chain serving healthy and seasonal salad bowls at more than 90 locations, and FoodCorps, a national nonprofit working to connect children to healthy food in 350 American schools, announced today a strategic partnership to reimagine the school cafeteria experience. Through the initiative, Sweetgreen has pledged $1 million over the next two years for the development of “a scalable model that works to advance the health of our nation’s 30 million students eating lunch every day.”

Called Reimagining School Cafeterias, the initiative builds off existing programs operated separately by each organization. By teaming up, the partners aim to broaden their impact and utilize their combined knowledge and technical acumen to craft engaging and informative cafeteria experiences for children centered on nutritious food.

“With FoodCorps we can really scale the idea of Sweetgreen in Schools with a focus on school cafeterias,” explains Nathaniel Ru, cofounder and chief brand officer of Sweetgreen. Sweetgreen in Schools was launched by the fast-casual company in 2010 and has reached 9,000 students with curriculum-based nutrition and sustainability education targeted at fourth- and fifth-grade children. Ru founded Sweetgreen in 2007 in Washington, D. C., with Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman. At the time, the three were classmates at Georgetown University.