The Smart Food Foundation provides whole grains, dried beans, nuts, healthy oil, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and cooking spices, along with cooking and nutrition education to help recipients turn these natural foods into healthy and delicious meals.
We buy in large bulk to keep our food costs to a minimum and depend entirely on volunteers. Our fully loaded cost is only 30 cents per meal.
We provide ingredients for over 800,000 healthy meals per year to low income communities in San Diego. But our long term goal is to help improve the diet of food insecure communities whether they are eating food that we provide them for free, or whether they are buying the food themselves.
It's a myth that healthy food needs to be more expensive than unhealthy food. Even at retail prices, the cost of a healthy delicious meal is only about $1 if you know which ingredients to buy and how to cook it.
With the right knowledge, meals based on the healthiest natural ingredients are less expensive, tastier and much healthier than processed foods.