Health Food for the Price of Fast Food: New Company Makes it Possible

Doug Rauch, former CEO of Trader Joe’s, has a novel idea; give people on limited incomes access to healthy, organic food. If you’ve always dreamed of shopping at Whole Foods, but decided against it so you wouldn’t have to take a second mortgage out on your home, take note of a new company called Daily Table, which is working to bring healthy foods to the masses.

Jonathan Wiggs—Boston Globe via Getty Images

Eating right, sadly, has often become too expensive for the vast majority of people. Many people want to eat organic food, but find it priced prohibitively to keep up with a healthy eating habit. In addition to this sad fact, more than 30 percent of our national food supply is wasted in the US. What?! Yeah, about 133 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States alone every year. Isn’t that crazy?

So why isn’t it available to people with lower incomes at more affordable prices? Doug Rauch was asking similar questions when he decided to create Daily Table.

The first store opened in Dorchester, Boston on June 4, 2015. As the very first line of Time’s article reads in large bold text, “Tons of items are under $1.”

The company’s website declares that most of their items are priced to compete with a trip to a fast food store. You can ‘grab-and-go’ with many items, without sacrificing your health.

“The answer here isn’t a full stomach, the answer has to be a healthy meal,” Rauch tells Fast Coexist. “When 49 million Americans aren’t able to eat properly, and because of it their health suffers—and they get obesity, heart disease, diabetes, in their teenage and young adult years—this is going to be a health care cost tsunami that hits all of us.”

Rauch is able to offer such low prices by working with vendors to purchase perfectly good food that might be thrown out for various reasons. This means that the company won’t always have the same food to offer – sometimes they have a bunch of zucchini while another time there will be an excess of spinach. But the savings are passed on to customers.

The company currently has over 5000 memberships and plans to expand into other cities.

Want to see other cool ideas like the DailyTable? Check out this vending machine that offers fresh, organic salads instead of candy bars.