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.

For the past 15 years, the Farm to Fork picnic has brought great chefs, farmers, producers, brewers, and artisans together for a delicious and educational afternoon in the Triangle. Farm 2 Fork 2023 took place on Sunday June 4th at the Fearrington Village in Chapel Hill. For this year’s event, Good Bowls teamed up with Weaver Street Market’s Executive Chef, Glenn Lozuke, and our local farm partner, Working Landscapes, to join the festivities.

The HOP program is piloting in North Carolina and is studying if non-medical interventions such as food, transportation, and safe housing can help create better outcomes for high-needs Medicaid recipients. Since all Good Bowls recipes are based on the popular Mediterranean diet and adapted for local cultural preferences so the HOP administrators were excited to have such a nutrient-packed meal, that is frozen, delicious, and readily available for delivery.

Good Bowls is currently conducting a worksite wellness study sponsored by the NIH called Eat Well at Work. For the past year and a half we have been recruiting worksites, finding participants, designing the study, and getting all of the details in place. We’re finally ready to announce that we’ve launched a number of vending machines throughout North Carolina!

Good Bowls are a great outlet for ‘grade B’ produce and with every batch of Good Bowls that we produce we’re able to order more grade B produce from local farmers that might otherwise go to waste, thereby greatly reducing food waste in our local system.

Our mission at Good Bowls is to make sure that everyone has access to nutritious and delicious food regardless of income or where they live. That’s why we’re particularly excited to have teamed up with two new partners this fall to help us reach even more people. We now work with ABC2NC in Halifax County and with UNC’s ACT Team to distribute meals through the Wake Heat-and-Eat program.

We kicked off October by working with UNC Edible Campus to cater the Harvest Fest on UNC’s campus. UNC Edible Campus plants and tends to gardens throughout the grounds and allows students to learn hands-on about food sustainability. So we were happy to partner with them to provide students with a healthy and sustainable meal for this year’s Harvest Festival.

It’s no secret that it’s hard to get local farm food into institutions like universities. They tend to be large organizations that have their food services managed by national organizations and use national broadline distributors.

Things are moving fast here at Good Bowls. We’re expanding our worksite vending machine program, we’ll be on even more college campuses across the state in the fall, we’re distributing statewide through The Produce Box, and our Healthy Opportunities Pilot in the Cape Fear Region is picking up steam. With all of these new customers as of late we’ve gotten quite a few requests for what people want in their Good Bowls.