This year we were excited to produce Fresh Truck’s first ever holiday music video — Jingle Bus! It was a celebration of our incredible partners, and communities during 2O16. We are honored to serve such enthusiastic and loving customers each and every day, there are never enough opportunities to say ‘Thank you’. With the support of the Fresh Truck Family, our Jingle Bus video was viewed by over 5O,OOO people!

Your support of Jingle Bus raised $2O,OOO for Fresh Truck renovations!

Many thanks to Nate Solder who stepped up to match all December donations to support Fresh Truck’s growth in 2O17. As a result of your contributions, Fresh Truck is expanding our mobile market operation to be a comprehensive one-stop-shop mobile grocery store. This means that in addition to fresh fruits and vegetables we will be able to carry meat, dairy, prepared foods and self-stable food items for our families to purchase. This renovation is no small feat, so we formed a brilliant project team including Kipp Bradford of the MIT Media Lab and TriMark a foodservice equipment and design company. These partners will be collaborating with the Fresh Truck team to build out an optimal mobile market blueprint, including the design and installation of a custom mobile cooling system and mobile refrigeration units.

Here’s a sneak preview of what we’re building:

We have a big vision for the future of food and healthcare, and we are only just getting started. It’s exciting to have all of you on board with us!

If you didn’t get to jingle with us in December, here’s a quick encore🔔:

We love Thanksgiving! It should be obvious given our line of work that a holiday centered around cooking and sharing good food with family and friends gives us all the feels. There are so many beautiful unique traditions around food this time of year and we are so glad Fresh Truck can be a part of them.

This year we made it our mission to increase the amount of fresh food available to families in need this holiday season. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, we partnered with Boston Public Market on a ‘Share an Extra’ campaign to get more fresh food into the kitchens and onto the tables of the families we serve. The community of customers at BPM came through to help fill up the bus with fresh local food for families from the Charles Street AME Church to enjoy.

In addition to our campaign with BPM, we coordinated 9 different Pop-up Markets and Grocery Deliveries in neighborhoods across Boston. Thanks to generous sponsors and partners we were able to offer discounts and gift cards so that most families received the food for free. During the week before Thanksgiving, Fresh Truck delivered more than $5,5OO of fresh food to nearly 75O families. This meant that on Thanksgiving our customers were able to enjoy fresh greens, sweet potatoes, and green beans at their family table.

As a holiday bonus, our founder Josh had Thanksgiving dinner with his favorite customer Carmen at her home in East Boston. They made a great Fresh Truck inspired meal and swapped stories around the table.

It’s the holiday season, which means eggnog, twinkling lights and awkward conversations with your in-laws (yes, Uncle Ted, we still drive a school bus full of fruit for a living). Many of our favorite holiday memories take place in the kitchen or around the dinner table. Whether it’s frying a turkey or grandma’s green bean casserole there’s nothing quite like getting together and sharing family recipes and food heritage. Although Thanksgiving isn’t known for being a health-centered holiday, some of our favorite dishes like sweet potatoes, green beans, and squash are full of vitamins and fiber. Preparing and eating fresh food is the cornerstone of our health, even on a holiday where some of us wear special pants to accommodate an extra slice of pie.

This is also the time of year when boxes start popping up in offices, classrooms, and churches to collect canned food donations for hungry families. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for these types of food drives to store and distribute fresh food. This means that some families end up with a Thanksgiving dinner prepared entirely from an assortment of boxes or cans.

To bridge the fresh food gap this holiday season Fresh Truck is partnering with Boston Public Market to provide more fresh food to families. During the BPM ‘Share an Extra’ campaign from November 17th-2Oth, shoppers can contribute fresh, locally sourced, food to a Boston family in need. All of the extras purchased will be loaded onto Fresh Truck and delivered to the Charles Street AME Church in Grove Hall. On November 22nd families will be given $1O gift cards to select the food they would like to prepare for Thanksgiving. Having fresh food to cook with and enjoy for the holidays will mean the world to these families.

If you can’t make it to Boston Public Market to participate in the ‘Share an Extra’ campaign, you can make a fresh food donation to Boston families this holiday via our website.

There are several other great organizations who work to get more fresh food to families in need:

• Food for Free
• Fair Foods
• Lovin’ Spoonfuls

Fresh Truck Market Manager

About Fresh Truck

Fresh Truck is on a mission to radically impact community health in Boston by getting food to those who need it most. We rethought the traditional grocery model and made it mobile by converting school buses into 300 sq. ft. mobile food markets and food education learning spaces that increase access to healthy food and foster health-centered community food culture. We love Boston, we’re obsessed with our mission and we’re committed to meaningful, long-term social impact. We take our work seriously, but at the end of the day we have a great time selling fruits from a bus, so we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Job description

Our Market Manager is Fresh Truck’s face in the community that keeps us running on time, fully stocked and delighting our customers. You will have the opportunity to shape Fresh Truck’s growth by supporting the innovation of our supply chain, customer experience, and community engagement. This role requires a diverse skill set blending food purveyor, dockworker, truck driver, and customer service representative (and occasional therapist). We’re looking for someone with an unrelenting passion for community building. This job is both physically and intellectually challenging— you’ll be tired but fulfilled at the end of each day.

What you’ll do

• Drive a full-size, 39ft school bus
• Support all direct operations for Fresh Truck’s food retail program, including check-out, bagging, restocking, customer service, and minor bus maintenance
• Communicate with vendors, supply chain partners, community partners, and community residents
• Work directly with Fresh Truck’s leadership team to design and execute marketing/community engagement initiatives to build brand awareness and drive sales
• Educate, mentor and support operations interns and volunteers

Who you are

• You embrace working within diverse community settings and with a strong sense of social justice; being multilingual and/or a Boston native is huge a plus
• An excellent driver, accustomed to driving in an urban environment; strong preference for individuals with experience driving box trucks and large vehicles
• Relentless organizer capable of improvising to ensure delivery and fulfillment
• Grit – you’re willing to get your hands dirty, comfortable with some heavy lifting (50 pounds) and will stop at nothing to make things happen
• 1-2 years of experience in one or a combination of the following: operations and supply chain management, food retail, and/or food service; experience with an early stage startup is a bonus

What you’ll get

• $15 hour and $10/ shift in free food; any additional purchases are 50% off
• The opportunity to shape Fresh Truck’s growth
• A network of food health advocates and partners
• Work day in and day out to make Boston a healthier city

Does this sound like your gig? Apply here.

We love Boston, so HUBweek’s celebration of all the things that make this city so special is something we’re thrilled to be a part of. In its second year, HUBweek produced a week-long series of events and experiences showcasing the future of art, technology, healthcare and all things in between that come from the intellectual energy here in Boston. Here at Fresh Truck, our favorite thing about the Boston spirit is the willingness to roll up our sleeves and collaborate on solving big problems. As Fresh Truck looks to our future we are excited about tackling the big problem of finding innovative ways to source local food from local farmers for our local customers all at an affordable price. So for our participation in HUBweek this year, we collaborated with some our favorite Boston organizations that do incredible work with local food.

Let’s Talk About Food

This year marks our fourth years as a part of the Let’s Talk About Food Festival in Copley Square and to make it our best year yet we partnered with our friends at the Boston Public Market. The BPM is a phenomenal marketplace for locally sourced produce and specialty agricultural products located at Haymarket Station. We’re excited to be working with them and their vendors to increase our local produce product offering as we move into the next growing season. For LTAF we featured several local products including locally grown tomatoes that were incorporated into recipes for Dinner Tonight, a new BPM initiative to making cooking local food at home easier while utilizing the bounty of the market.

Brew the Charles

There’s nothing better than a beer by the water, but in this case, it was a beer from the water. Six incredible local breweries were tasked with brewing a winning beer from the Charles River. Don’t worry, it was all purified by Desalitech a water technology company from Newton. For this event, we partnered with b.good because what goes better with a local beer than a local burger? The team at b.good donated kale grown at Hannah Farm on an island in Boston Harbor. 75% of what is grown on this farm is donated to local food non-profits and the other 25% is used as ingredients for your neighborhood b.good. We think this is the coolest thing since sliced tomatoes, you can learn more about the work b.good does at Hannah Farms here.

June – August 2016

This summer was our busiest one yet. There was no shortage of summer camps, exciting events, and weekly market stops. Summer months are the best time to get outdoors and enjoy good food with people. Thank you to all of our wonderful customers and partners for your part in such a fabulous Fresh Truck summer!

We logged a record-setting $40,000+ in sales that spanned over:

12 Weekly Market locations  //  41 Popup Events  //  7 Food Kit Deliveries

Best Sellers

Fruit rules during the summer months. Our top sellers this summer were:

1. Bananas – 7,923
2. Oranges – 3,045
3. Plums – 2,729

Food Rx @ SECHC

This summer we also piloted our first Fresh Truck Food Rx location at the South End Community Health Center. We developed Food Rx as a tool to enable any organization to underwrite the cost of healthy food for families in need by utilizing one of our programs. Health centers and other organizations pre-purchase Fresh Truck Food Rx gift cards, distribute them to families, and families use the gift cards to shop at Pop-Up and Weekly Market sites.

3 months    //     every Friday    //    $6,300 in food prescribed

Fresh Truck goes to summer camp

Our bag is heavy because of all the veggies, duh.

We partnered up with the Grove Hall Freedom School and to spend 4 weeks with their scholars talking favorite foods, healthy lifestyles, and how to whip up all the best stuff in the kitchen. Fresh Truck brought the food and Grove Hall residents led the nutrition education and cooking lessons. At the end of each day, the campers hopped on the bus and filled their Fresh Truck totes with all the ingredients from the cooking demo that afternoon. All smiles, activities and fun sponsored by HoodFit.

Hey, Fresh Truck fam! We’re calling out anyone and everyone who loves bikes, healthy food, or good vibes. This year, Fresh Truck is participating the Three Squares New England Ride for Food, a bike ride to raise money for the MA nonprofits dedicated to addressing hunger and food access around Massachusetts. Eighteen different organizations are participating this year, with the goal of raising upwards of $350,000.

 If you these guacamole-eating kids are as cute as we do, Join Team Fresh Truck for the ride and help us to continue driving food, health, community and two big big buses! Here are the details:

• The ride is taking place September 25th, beginning and ending at the Noble and Greenough School in Dedham.
• Riders can choose between a 10, 25, or 50 mile ride.
• All riders are asked to raise $1,000 by asking family, friends, and coworkers to donate. (Don’t worry, we’ll help you out along the way!)
• Don’t have a bike? No worries – these guys have you covered.
• Not up for riding, but still want to help? Sign up to volunteer or donate to the cause here.

The Ride for Food will have tons of food, fun activities, and music for the whole family. Not only will it be a great time, but every dollar raised will go to alleviating hunger in Massachusetts. If you have any questions, drop us a note or stop by our Weekly Market. See you at the Ride!

Shout out to our race team sponsors:

Last time we checked in, we let you know that we were trading in our dress clothes for flannels to hit the road for our first winter. We ended up needing more than just a flannel… because of a slight miscalculation with the mechanical requirements of running heat in a fruit bus, we had to ride out the winter in the cold— big ups to Randy for gutting it out.

Aside from some minor frostbite and a few dead batteries, we made it through our first winter:

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We’re most excited about our new partnerships with Rosie’s Place, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Public Schools! With the help of these wonderful organizations, we’re delivering more than 100 bags of fresh produce each month to food-insecure families around Boston.

We have also launched the first ever Fresh Truck Food Rx Pilot site, sponsored by the South End Community Health Center. Patients of the health center can pick up a $5.00 Food Rx Gift Card to shop on Fresh Truck every Friday from 4:00pm- 6:00pm. This program is being sponsored by the South End Community Health Center.

This spring, we’ll be expanding our Weekly Market sites and hosting even more programs each month. Stay tuned for more winter recaps, spring updates, volunteer/ internship opportunities and even a chance to bike for Fresh Truck, coming soon!

Powering Fresh Truck:

Driving food, health and community: