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Revolution Foods Wins Global Social Venture Competition
April 16, 2007
Serving healthy home-style school lunches in the San Francisco Bay Area earned the Berkeley MBA team Revolution Foods the $25,000 grand prize at the eighth annual Global Social Venture Competition on Friday, April 13.
Revolution Foods, based in Emeryville and founded by Kristin Richmond-Groos and Kirsten Tobey, both MBA 06, has successfully replaced tater tots and mystery meats with meals such as spaghetti marinara, couscous, brown rice, and fresh fruit at nine charter schools since its founding in August 2006. The venture’s deliveries have doubled to 1,500 meals per day since August and are expected to double again before the year’s end. Revolution Foods also provides nutrition education and technical support to the schools they serve.
Despite using mostly organic foods, Revolution Foods is able to provide its service at prices comparable to larger competitors. Creating a scalable and profitable business that also returns a positive social impact -- healthier foods, higher awareness of the foods children eat and, in the long run, less obesity -- is the very definition of a social venture. Revolution Foods also engages in environmentally responsible practices such as composting, provides benefits to employees, and pays above-living wage compensation.
Three teams tied for second place, each winning $5,000:
Verdacure from Thammasat, Bangkok, Thailand provides an herbal remedy for periodontal disease. Verdacure’s business model captures profits from selling its medicine through dental care providers in Thailand to pay for affordable mobile dental education and treatment services for rural villagers.
Feed Resource Recovery from Babson University provides the food industry with a cost-effective waste disposal solution that produces both renewable energy and organic fertilizer from the food waste generated by supermarkets and restaurants thanks to an onsite waste conversion system.
d.light from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business aims to replace kerosene or fuel-based lighting with cheaper, safer, and brighter LED lighting for many of the 1.6 billion people around the globe who live without electricity.
Stanford’s d.light also won the $5,000 prize for providing the best Sustainable Impact Assessment analysis for their venture. In addition to a business plan, all competing teams had to submit a Social Impact Assessment that was judged by the five partner schools.
The Global Social Venture Competition, started by Berkeley MBA students in 1999, is a partnership between the Haas School, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Yale School of Management and Indian School of Business. The University of Geneva and a consortium of business schools in Korea called Social Venture Competition Korea joined as affiliates.
A record 157 teams from 80 universities in 20 countries had entered this year’s competition.
Omidyar Network gave a $300,000 gift to support the competition over the next three years. Other sponsors include Hewlett-Packard Company, Morrison & Foerster LLP, Opus Prize Foundation, Gray Matters Capital, and New Resource Bank.
More details about the competition are online at http://www.socialvc.net.