Real Food for Real Kids is on a mission to make great nutrition an integral part of raising healthy kids.
Food in Canada, the voice of the Canadian food and beverage processing industry, has recognized our innovative approach to delivering sustainable, quality-driven excellence in children’s catering.
Thank you to all of our clients and families for your support in providing a delicious and healthy alternative to highly processed “kids’ food”.
Here’s to your health and wellness,
The RFRK Team
Real Food for Real Kids – Health and Wellness Award
By Carol Neshevich
Lulu Cohen-Farnell and her husband David Farnell are on a mission. As owners of Real Food for Real Kids (RFRK), a Toronto-based company that prepares and delivers healthy meals and snacks to schools, daycares and camps across the city, they see their business as more than just a business – it’s a calling, really, to train children and their parents to make healthy eating an integral part of their lives.
“We understand the responsibility we have in shaping the trajectory of any given child’s palate towards healthy,” says Farnell, who is also the company’s CEO. “And we find it absolutely essential for them to develop familiarity (with varied tastes) early, which we all know leads to greater likelihood of acceptance through life.”
Real Food for Real Kids co-owners Lulu Cohen-Farnell and David Farnell.
To that end, their menus are specifically designed to expand children’s palates. In contrast to the chicken nuggets and mini pizzas that have been known to dominate daycare menus, RFRK entrées range from ratatouille with organic tofu to white bean curry or fish bolognese. “There’s this whole notion here in North America that kids’ food has to be different from grown-up food,” says Cohen-Farnell, whose title is founder, president and CFIO (Chief Food Innovation Officer). “In other countries where real food has a major place in the culture, and kids are exposed to a number of flavours, textures, spices and herbs from a young age, the children are more adventurous eaters.”
Unlike many of their competitors who rely on large global food distributors and simply reheat the food, RFRK has its own kitchen that’s equipped to make food from scratch. “In order to ensure healthy, delicious and nutritious food, you need to be in control of your ingredients, and the only way to do that is to have a from-scratch kitchen,” says Farnell. “We produce everything in-house that we possibly can, so that means all the proteins, the grains, the marinades, sauces, dips, dressings – we even make our own sugar-free ketchup,” he adds, noting that there are some items they simply can’t make themselves, such as crackers, cheese and yogurt (due to dairy regulations), but in those cases they make sure all ingredients conform to RFRK’s quality standards.
And those standards are quite exacting. “For everything from the grass-fed beef we serve to the sea salt we use in our cooking, we investigate every single ingredient that comes into our kitchen,” says Cohen-Farnell. “We put an enormous amount of questions to the supplier, wanting to know what the animals are fed and how they are treated, where the salt is coming from, how it’s been processed. Our focus is on local sustainably grown food as much as possible…we avoid GMOs, artificial colours and preservatives. We prefer to work with growers and suppliers who are close to us so we can visit their plants, visit the farmers, and make sure we share the same values and ethics.”
Besides producing and providing healthy food for kids, RFRK’s mission includes an educational component as well. “We call ourselves an edu-caterer,” says Cohen-Farnell. “We do a lot of parent seminars. I do talks at different conferences. We’ve also done kids’ workshops where we taught the kids about fruits and vegetables.”
In addition to the 85 staff employed at the Real Food kitchen in downtown Toronto, RFRK also hires about 100 contractors called Real Food Lunch Club Coaches who serve lunches in elementary schools. Trained by RFRK, the “coaches” are also expected to be food educators, telling the kids nutritional facts and stories about the food served, and encouraging them to try everything.
Even though the world may be starting to move toward a greater desire for clean and healthy food overall, maintaining a strong commitment to health and wellness isn’t always easy in a world where the bottom line is often king. “It’s really been a huge challenge to be entrepreneurs who are mission driven, with a social mission and a purpose that goes beyond profitability,” says Farnell. “It’s hard. But it’s extremely important to us. It goes towards helping kids and parents have a greater likelihood of high health outcomes throughout their lives.”
Read the Food in Canada 2016 Leadership Awards article here.