PROVIDENCE – Food on the Move, a mobile produce market that visits community locations across Rhode Island, selling low cost, high quality fresh fruits and vegetables, held a community breakfast on Thursday morning, Sept. 6, on the front lawn of Dexter Manor at 100 Broad St., joining with residents of the public housing project to celebrate six years of partnership with the Providence Housing Authority and Tourtellot and Company.

Food on the Move, an initiative of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute, began in 2012 as an effort to increase the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables as a public health clinical research trial supported by NIH. The effort now serves more than 5,000 customers annually at some 35 “mobile markets” each month. A potential expansion is under consideration, depending upon the potential to secure additional resources.

Research has found that some 13 percent of Rhode Islanders are food insecure; in the low-income communities that Food on the Move serves, closer to 30 percent are food insecure. Initial studies have found that the people who regularly shop the mobile markets significantly increase the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables they eat.

The R.I. Public Health Institute is now conducting research on how the program efforts to increase fresh fruit and vegetable consumption may affect health outcomes and health care costs. The findings from the study are to be published sometime in 2019.

Melissa Sanzaro, the executive director of the Providence Housing Authority, told ConvergenceRI at the community breakfast that one of the reasons for the success of the program was that it broke down the barriers of limited access “that our public housing residents may have to fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Sanzaro also attributed the success of Food on the Move to the sense of community it had created as part of shopping at the market. “I think with our elderly and disabled [residents in] high rises, being social and getting to know your neighbors is sometimes not as easy as it sounds in a condensed community like this,” she said. Food on the Move, Sanzaro said, really brings the community out.

A key community partner
Andrew Sigal, the CEO of Tourtellot and Co., a fruit and produce distributor based in Warwick, told ConvergenceRI at the community breakfast that he was happy to be a part of the endeavor bringing fresh fruit and vegetables to underserved neighborhoods. In addition to being a vendor for the fruits and vegetables sold at the mobile market, Tourtellot also provides the cold storage space. “It’s a wonderful program with the most wonderful, dedicated people,” he said.

Relationship building
Amy Nunn, the director of the R.I. Public Health Institute, praised the relationship with Tourtellot, saying that the value was not just about buying produce from the distributor.

“They’ve helped us a lot in thinking about marketing, in how to do promotion, in how best to place the fruits and vegetables at the mobile markets – all of the practicalities that the private sector knows about,” Nunn said.

Also, Nunn continued, they’ve allowed us to use their cold storage space, without which, she said, “We wouldn’t be able to do this project.”