Wholesome Crave: Transforming Large-Scale Food Services for a Sustainable Future
Wholesome Crave, a for-profit food company, has become a leading supplier of plant-based meal solutions for large scale dining facilities. Born out of the desire to support the impactful work of Wholesome Wave, Wholesome Crave aims to enable long term food policy and cause-based advocacy through a plant-based approach to scaled food services.
“I wanted to leverage my four decades of experience to design a plant-based approach to scaled food service using real vegetables, grains, and legumes—along with cultural authenticity and respect – to field delicious products that help institutions address some of the most vexing challenges created by our current food system,” Michel Nischan, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wholesome Crave, tells Food Tank. “Our products naturally address climate change, biodiversity, and cultural authenticity.”
In 2007, Nischan co-founded Wholesome Wave alongside food policy leader Gus Schumacher and American food writer Michael Batterberry. The nonprofit organization strives to address diet-related diseases by helping low-income Americans buy and eat healthy fruits and vegetables. Wholesome Wave partners with community-based organizations to raise and re-invest private funding through programs that meet the unique needs of each community. According to Nischan, Wholesome Crave can help Wholesome Wave meet the challenges of traditional philanthropy in sustaining long-haul initiatives.
“Policy advocacy is difficult to find funding for, so launching a for-profit food company to steer unrestricted, tax-free gross revenue royalties to Wholesome Wave was an opportunity we needed to pursue,” Nischan says.
Through selling responsibly sourced, plant-based soups into the marketplace, Wholesome Crave directly supports food policy advocacy, such as the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) in the 2018 Farm Bill. Nischan believes that this model can reveal how food manufacturing for scaled environments can be designed for impact from the start.
To read more on this article, written by Liza Greene, click here.
