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.

At Good Bowls our mission is to support the local food economy. We source as many ingredients as we can from local farmers and we produce all of our Bowls right here in the Triangle. So when we’re able to get into more freezers and onto more tables in North Carolina we can order more food from local farmers and hire more people to prepare our bowls…..building the local food economy one bowl at a time.

Two thousand meals is a lot of tupperware bins full of meals….33 of them actually….but we really get there 2 or 3 donated meals at a time. The Pay-It-Forward program has proven itself to be sustainable throughout the year by so many people donating just a few meals at a time. So if you’re considering donating, know that your donation of just a couple bowls will make not only this campaign a huge success but our future campaigns as well.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we first launched our Pay-It-Forward back in the spring of 2021. It was a time when restaurants were really struggling to stay open and local families were struggling with food insecurity. Now a year later, things are slowly starting to get back to normal, restaurants are seeing their customers returning, but due to a number of factors, local food insecurity continues as a major local challenge.

In addition to developing Good Bowls, we also piloted a frozen-meal vending machine to sell our Good Bowls at a reduced price at worksites with limited availability of healthy food.

As we discovered, not only was this idea feasible, but there is significant demand for it innovative strategies to get healthy meals to those at risk for food insecurity or chronic disease. So the NIH recently awarded Good Bowls an STTR Phase 2 grant to move our idea from the pilot phase into commercialization and to test the health impact in rural blue collar worksites.

Good Bowls (Equiti Foods) is the excited recent recipient of a USDA Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) grant. Since our founding, Good Bowls has been on a mission to support the local food system by working with local farmers and local producers to source the ingredients for our Good Bowls. So, the UDSA’s LFPP grant fits right into what we’ve always been doing, and will now help us do it on an even larger scale.

Our January 2022 campaign was our biggest campaign to date with over 800 meals donated for local families struggling with food insecurity. This last round we teamed up with Greg and Maria from The Sycamore in Pittsboro, NC. The community was so excited to participate during this round we had people calling in to ask how close we were to certain milestones and then donating up to 150 meals at a time! And where it really counts, we had scores of people donating just 1 or 2 meals. With such broad participation, we hit a new Pay-It-Forward record.

Well times have changed here a bit at Good Bowls. Gone are the days of slinging a few bowls out of the back of the pickup so we needed an upgrade as we’re getting into more stores and in a wider area in NC. Enter the Good Bowls Van!

We picked up a Chevy Express ‘Reefer’ van that keeps our bowl nice an frozen while they’re on the way to a shelf near you. And of course we couldn’t be driving around in a boring white panel van, so we had it wrapped in our bright, vibrant, and very noticeable blue.

We’ve learned that hungry college students like Good Bowls for quite a variety of reasons. Many like the fact that they can keep a couple bowls in their freezer and have a nutritious and tasty meal ready in just 4 minutes while they are studying or getting home late.

Other like to support the local food economy by purchasing a Good Bowl. They know that with every bowl sold, we’re able to source more ingredients from local farms and employ more local chefs to make the Bowls right here in the triangle.

Good Bowls has a fresh new look, we’re rolling out 4 new flavors that hit the shelves in December, and our Autumn Pay-It-Forward food equity program set a new record with 334 meals cooked and donated.

Last week Good Bowls travelled with WSM Executive Chef, Glenn Lozuke, down to the Hines Family Farm in Jacksonville, NC. We spent the day with Donald Hines, a 4th generation farmer, touring his fields and learning about his business. Donald currently grows zucchini, squash, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, and many other staple North Carolina vegetables. He sells his produce wholesale to Weaver Street Market (to help make Good Bowls) and also sells his vegetables at road side stands in his community in an effort to eliminate food deserts in his region.

When we sat down with the Executive Director of Communities in Schools of Chatham County, Tych Cowdin told us that, “over the course of the pandemic, food insecurity became a big issue, particularly in our town.”

For the campaign during August 2021, we’re working with Chef Sera Cuni at The Root Cellar and our perennial partner, Pittsboro Eats, to collect donations, cook up some healthy meals, and then distribute them to food-insecure families in our community.  Sera is a classically trained chef with decades of experience creating seasonal classics loaded with fresh, local vegetables and seasoned with regionally inspired spices from all around the world. We can’t wait to see what’s in season and coming out of her kitchen on meal-production day after the campaign wraps up. 

For our campaign in June and July 2021 we worked with Pittsboro EATS and partnered with Kristin Bulpitt at Copeland Springs Farm and Kitchen. Over 125 meals were donated so we spent a morning preparing nutritious meals, sourced right from Kristin's farm, and then distributed them through our partner, Communities in Schools.

Within days of the pandemic shutdown, Carrboro United Food Hub was born. It was not only a place where you could get fresh vegetables, meats, and prepared meals for your family during the pandemic lock down, but it was also a lifeline to many local businesses, restaurants, and most importantly employees.

After being closed for the past year Present Day on Main, previously Johnny’s Gone Fishing, was excited to finally re-open its doors to the public to show off its freshly updated community space. To help kick off the event, Good Bowls cooked up some huge batches of our Chicken Burrito Bowls and our Vegetable Curry Bowls to help provide event attendees some tasty morsels to go along with their iced coffees and fresh pastries.

We started this campaign with the goal of having 50 meals donated over the two-week period. We were taken by storm with the generosity of the community, and we surpassed our goal within the first 24 hours.

Red Tail Grains grinds their grits right here in Orange County, NC and they are on their way to your breakfast table very soon.