Growing Meals

For a lot of kids in Asheville, the meals they get at daycare are the most reliable food of their whole day. That fact is the reason Growing Meals exists.

Buncombe County, where I live, has somewhere around 8,000 children growing up in food-insecure homes. The childcare centers that feed them tend to be small and stretched thin, too small to run a real kitchen of their own, so they lean on a part-time cook to figure something out or send a note home asking parents to pack a lunch. And there’s a federal program, CACFP, that will hand a center $4.43 for every lunch it serves to a low-income kid. Most of them never collect a dime of it, because qualifying turns into its own part-time paperwork job.

Growing Meals is the nonprofit I started back in 2025 to chip away at some of that. I built the web platform that runs the ordering and carries the admin overhead for the center, a catering partner cooks and delivers the food, and our board has grown to five people. We have just signed contracts with new locations, which puts us at more than 120 kids served this fall.

The piece that makes the whole thing click is CACFP, becoming a certified sponsor so that federal money starts to flow and the meals turn free for the families who need them most. That’s the paperwork I mentioned, and we are grinding through it right now. The platform I built is meant to carry that load once the certification lands: it sorts out who qualifies as free, reduced, or paid by the actual federal rules, charges the right price, and spits out the compliance reports the USDA wants to see.

So we are still early on, but the food is real, the locations are signed, 120 kids eat this fall, and we are a few certifications away from turning a whole lot of those meals free.

If you want to follow along, you can find us over at growingmeals.org.