Innovate Carolina specializes in helping UNC faculty and students take their research or idea and turn it into a successful and sustainable business. Innovate Carolina prides itself on helping people translate their research and ideas into companies that can shape society and the economy for the better. Good Bowls are a perfect example of this in action. Alice’s career of research into the Mediterranean diet and her experience working in the field of public health inspired the creation of the product Good Bowls and the company Equiti Foods.

Kristin Bulpitt and Melissa Hegarty now head our kitchen dedicated to producing Medically Tailored Meals. We’ve created a variety of meals that meet a number of cultural preferences and dietary requirements including carb-controlled meals, low sodium meals, kidney friendly, and heart healthy. Some of the new recipes are Country Captain, Sweet Potato Hash, Meatballs and Mash, Blueberry Crumble Oats (breakfast meal), and many more.

On Nov. 17, 2023, Good Bowls founder and Director of UNC’s Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Dr. Alice Ammerman, hosted  UNC’s Thorp Faculty Engaged Scholars program.  Good Bowls focuses on nutrition, the local food system, and food insecurity.  So, for the fall semester program Alice scheduled time at CORA, the local food pantry, to participate in a food distribution and later took the group to one of Good Bowls’ production kitchens, 39 West, where Good Bowls produces many of the meals used for the Medicaid Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP).

During the pandemic, Good Bowls and Pittsboro Eats worked together on the Pay-It-Forward program, which similarly raised money for the meals and cooked them at local restaurants - helping local families and restaurants at the same time. Now that the pandemic is behind us, we’ve joined with the newly formed non-profit Chatham Alliance and the Pay-It-Forward program has grown up into Community Harvest. We’re still soliciting donations and now with Chatham Alliance we’re connected to more organizations & community partners - enabling us to reach even more neighbors in need of a healthy meal.

Community Harvest is the next generation of Pay-It-Forward. In addition to Pittsboro Eats, we’ve added the newly formed non-profit Chatham Alliance to the team. Now all campaign contributions are tax deductible and we’re connected to even more community partners in the region, meaning Community Harvest is not only more sustainable in the long term, but we can also reach even more neighbors in need.

Good Bowls has been bringing on a steady stream of HOP enrollees for the past year and the program continues to grow - so much so that we needed to partner with a new kitchen just to keep up with the demand.  Last week we cooked our first batch of Bowls with 39 West Catering in Pittsboro, NC.  Owner Greg Lewis and his team at 39 West Catering have been cooking up delicious creations for the people of Chatham County and the surrounding area for years, and are excited to join the HOP program to help provide nutritious meals for Medicaid recipients in the Cape Fear NC region.  

For centuries, breaking bread has been used to build  relationships, camaraderie, and trust between those sharing the meal.  Staff in the Heat and Eat program are using this time-tested tradition to connect and build relationships with patients that have been historically hard to reach.

Patients can be confident that Good Bowls has a meal that will taste good to them. Particularly in the oncology unit, patients' taste buds are often dulled due to chemotherapy, and food often has a metallic and unappealing taste. Food with more robust flavors is more attractive to this population with dulled taste buds. With Good Bowls, we can ensure that this appealing food is also nutritious and convenient.

Good Bowls and company founder Dr. Alice Ammerman are featured in the most recent issue of Futurum Magazine.  Futurum Magazine is an international publication that teaches teens from around the world about possible careers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.  In the latest issue, Futurum discusses how nutrition professor Dr. Alice Ammerman created Good Bowls stemming from her decades of work in public health and research of the Mediterranean diet.  

Glenn Lozuke, the Executive Chef at Weaver Street helped us convert a small family size recipe into a meal that can be made on an industrial level in a commercial kitchen, putting out thousands of bowls in a week. Martha Lopez, the Director of Kitchen Operations helped to create the Good Bowls production process so that all the local produce could be ordered from local farms in time to produce 1,000 Farmhouse Mac n Cheese bowls one week and then 1,000 Carolina Chicken BBQ bowls the next week.