Is Fresh Salad At Gas Stations The Answer To Food Deserts?

The Fresh Corner Café is on a mission to change the convenience store curse of the Twinkies. This Detroit-based start-up is a catering and delivery service that helps to stock convenience stores and gas station pit-stops with fresh salads, fruit, wraps, and parfaits. The point of the company is to ameliorate the negative effects of living in a food desert. Right now, the company, which works as both a nutritional consulting, and fresh food delivery service, is only working in the Detroit area but there might be plans to expand nationwide.

"At Fresh Corner, we don't prescribe specific ingredients or specific foods or specific times of day, we just advise people to eat their greens, add a few more vegetable servings, and cut out the junk when possible," said Noam Kimelman, co-founder of Fresh Corner Café. "If you begin adopting these habits as not a diet but a way of life, you will be delighted as the body fat fades away and the results show."

The company right now targets low-income customers by selling to mini-marts, pharmacies, and convenience stores that take food assistance cards. Right now, Fresh Corner Café is in 27 locations across Detroit.

"It is a social injustice for people to not have access to fresh food," Kimelman told Civil Eats. "Detroiters are so used to not having things that they don't even know how to ask for them." 

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Joanna Fantozzi is an Associate Editor with The Daily Meal. Follow her on Twitter @JoannaFantozzi