On October 27, Food Tank, FareRx, AmeriHealth Caritas and Temple University's College of Public Health hosted the first ever Food First Health Summit in Philadelphia. Doctors, farmers, grocers, food banks, state officials and members of Congress came together to spend an afternoon centered around one idea: that food is medicine.
No-one in the room needed convincing on that core principle. Everyone knows that interventions like medically tailored meals work, produce prescriptions work, and the evidence that food is medicine keeps growing.
The harder question to solve came up consistently in every panel. How do we get nutritious food to actually reach the people who need it most? An estimated 53.6 million Americans live in low-income areas far from a supermarket (USDA ERS, 2019). A prescription for vegetables only works if there’s somewhere to fill it. And that is the last mile. Here are five lessons from the summit about how we zero in on closing it.
Access to Logistics, Not Just Price
Steven Jennings, the Health Partnerships Lead at Ahold Delhaize USA, parent of the The Giant Company, shared an anecdote that their nearest full store took four bus stops to reach and the bus only allowed two bags per rider. A full grocery run was simply not possible.
Additional panelists pointed out quieter barriers to food access: time, energy, a second job, no working stove. Even a family that has the means to afford fresh food may not have the hours to go and get it and then cook it.
Pricing matters, but the trip itself often matters more. A mobile market that parks where people already are removes the obstacle of a long trip: no transfers, no bag limits, no lost afternoon.
Choice Beats a Bag of Food
The Food Trust runs produce prescription programs in partnership with health centers across Philadelphia. Julia Koprak, the Food Trust’s Director of Incentives, Healthcare and Policy, made a simple point: handing every patient the exact same bag of food assumes that everyone eats the same way, when they don’t.
The Trust’s programs give patients coupons to spend on fresh fruits and vegetables at any store or farmers’ market of their choosing. Patients told them plainly that without the coupons, they could not afford to shop there at all.
Dr. Lauren Eberly, a Penn cardiologist with the Indian Health Service in the Navajo Nation, took it further. Her heart failure meal program was designed with community elders and sourced directly from local farmers and ranchers. It’s an important reminder that food carries culture, family and memory, and respecting that keeps people engaged.
A mobile market allows attendees to pick their own food, face to face, the way any shopper would. It feels like shopping rather than an intervention, and that feeling of dignity is what keeps people coming back.
SNAP Changes are Shifting the Load to Food Banks
Dr. Val Arkoosh, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Human Services, reported that an estimated 116,000 Pennsylvanians have lost SNAP benefits since September 2025. She noted many are likely still eligible but are now caught in new paperwork requirements.
Loree D. Jones Brown, CEO of Philabundance, put the gap in numbers. For every meal a food bank provides, SNAP provides nine. Food banks cannot absorb that difference. She added that it’s possible that some grocery stores, which depend on SNAP dollars, may close too.
This is a double hit: fewer benefits, and potentially fewer places to spend them.
When the safety net shrinks, food access points matter more, not less. Markets that accept SNAP and other nutrition incentives keep those dollars working in local neighborhoods.
Federal Rural Health Funding Can Pay for Trucks
This was the most practical news of the day. Julia Weatherly, who works in the Office of Rural Health Transformation at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, broke down how the program works.
Every state receives its own funding. Each state decides how to use it, based on its own needs assessments and community input. Some are changing what schools, prisons and hospitals buy. Others are investing in infrastructure, including trucks with cold storage.
The main catch is accountability. States must have evaluation plans and report their progress quarterly and annually. Federal staff meet with them as often as weekly.
This means that if you serve rural communities, you can find out how your state is spending its Rural Health Transformation dollars and potentially benefit from that funding if you have a plan that shows reach and results from day one.
Measure What You Can Show Early
Proving that a food is medicine program works depends largely on what you measure. Clinical markers such as blood sugar take time to move. However, infrastructure and reach can show up right away through metrics like families served, number of visits, pounds of produce distributed, new access points reached, etc.
Dr. David Grande, Special Advisor for Medicaid Innovation at Pennsylvania's Department of Human Services, pointed to North Carolina's Healthy Opportunities Pilots to argue that the long-term case for these programs is strong. They used Medicaid to pay for food and other non-medical needs, and an evaluation found they cut Medicaid costs by $164 per member per month, net of program costs (NCDHHS, 2026).
However, North Carolina still paused the program in July 2025 when state funding lapsed. It is now restarting at a smaller scale. Additionally, Philadelphia's MANNA published early research on medically tailored meals in 2015, which led to some of the first health plan contracts in the country.
Pennsylvania now has federal approval to use Medicaid for medically tailored meals, but it still needs state budget funding to launch.
This serves as an important reminder to mobile market operators to track your reach from week one. Future funders and health partners need early proof while the health outcomes build slowly.
The Thread Through it All
Throughout the entire summit, two ideas continued to come up again and again. First, farmers should be partners, not just suppliers. Dr. Eberly said it directly when asked what she wants to see more of. Local growers know the food, the seasons, and the people.
Second, the community has to be at the center. The programs that worked best were designed in partnership with the people they serve, not for them. Listening came before building.
Overall, the summit showed that the food is medicine doctrine is no longer an idea that needs proving, it needs delivery. Mobile markets are one of the most direct ways to get it there: fresh food delivery parked where families already live.
Want to bring a mobile market to your community? Funding can come from grants, health partners, and state programs like the Office of Rural Health Transformation. Explore your funding options today.
Sources
Food First Health Summit Philadelphia livestream, Food Tank, Oct 27, 2026
Summit speakers, Philadelphia Food as Medicine Coalition
Healthy Opportunities Pilots evaluation, NCDHHS, June 2026