Feeding Change: A Sustainable Financial, Social, and Environmental Model for Business and Nonprofit / Sustainability Lunch Series

How do you turn a great idea for food access into something that actually works nation-wide? Join Michel Nischan, celebrated chef and founder of Wholesome Wave and Wholesome Crave, and Casey Crane, Executive Director of Wholesome Wave, for a conversation about building parallel nonprofit and for-profit models that reinforce each other. For two decades, Wholesome Wave has developed and tested innovated models to improve food access, designed to be replicated at scale, expanding what's possible for communities to access healthy, affordable food regardless of age, race, religion, or zip code. Wholesome Crave, a plant-based soup company, also founded by Nischan, takes a broader and additive approach: its revenue model channels a share of profits back to Wholesome Wave, while its plant-forward menu embodies the same food-systems values in a commercial product.

Michel and Casey will walk through how Wholesome Wave got began and continues to design programs for testing and scale, how Wholesome Crave's business model was structured to fund that mission, and what it takes to run a nonprofit and a for-profit in tandem toward the same goal. They'll offer perspective for MIT Sloan students interested in food systems, social enterprise, and impact-driven business models.

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