Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN) members Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with other Boston anchor institutions, are procuring local and unique products from diverse, locally owned food start-up businesses.
CommonWealth Kitchen, a nonprofit kitchen in Dorchester, MA, is incubating more than 50 small, mostly minority-owned, and community-based food start-up businesses. It adopted a strategy to help grow the start ups by connecting them to the product needs of Boston’s 20 hospitals and 31 universities, that comprise 18% of Boston’s employees.
So CommonWealth Kitchen tried a different route, asking the institutions what foods they needed. The nonprofit now has its in-house team of chefs preparing less exotic food like apple crisp and eggplant meatballs for Harvard, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital, in the hope that purchasing agents will also order the vendors’ products.