The Spark that Ignited Real Food for Real Kids, by David Farnell

While searching for the ideal childcare centre for our son Max, my wife Lulu Cohen-Farnell and I discovered a shocking consistency. Regardless of neighborhood, price, style, or educational philosophy, every centre we visited served the same type of food: menus based on processed, frozen and canned convenience foods. Very little fresh, and almost nothing cooked from scratch.

Not wanting Max's palate and body to base its earliest memories on these kinds of foods, Lulu made and sent snacks and lunch with Max every day. The caregivers at the centre spoke so highly of his food that the centre's director began speaking with Lulu about ways of increasing the healthfulness of the snacks that Max's friends were eating. The director at the time, Suzy Moreira, is smart, dynamic and thoughtful - and she had the vision to recognize longterm benefits of feeding the children at her centre healthy food.

Being a visionary, Suzy also recognized the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve the overall goal. She explained to us that the available nutrition service options were severely limited for the childcare community. There simply was no option of fresh, cooked from scratch food available to them.

We wondered what it would take to create something totally different, because it was clear that the catering program these kids needed didn't exist yet. Rather than processed, frozen, and canned, we thought that little bodies would be better built with meals that focused on fresh, all natural, whole, healthy, and locally grown foods. We called this model Real Food for Real Kids. The premise was to provide childcare centres and schools with a daily delivery of fully cooked lunches, prepared snacks, and fresh fruits and vegetables. All of it would be free of chemical preservatives, artificial colouring, fake sweeteners, synthetic ingredients, and factory-farmed meats.

We thought it self evident that real kids should have a diet based on real food. The pre-packaged convenience food model was the only game in town, but not because it was the best way to feed kids. No one had challenged it yet! So we did the only sensible thing: we took out a second mortgage on the house, quit our other jobs, hired some amazing people, and went through a full scale re-think of childcare food service.

The first childcare centre served by Real Food for Real Kids was the very same centre that Max enjoyed crawling, toddling, walking, and running through much of his five first years - the amazing YMCA Family Development Centre in Toronto, ON.

So it grows...

Five incredibly short years later, our team of 30 inspiring, intrepid people at Real Food for Real Kids operates the leading child-focused catering programs in Canada. And we're doing it with fresh food cooked from scratch.