[8456523]

Aren't you worried that such a startup will run up against the same systemic biases that have been preventing poor minority neighborhoods from accessing healthy food at reasonable prices for decades?

In other words, food truck entrepreneurs have been around for decades, so why doesn't the service you imagine exist yet? Because so far no one with the right motivation, i.e., no one with their heart in the right place, has tried what you imagine?

[barry-cotter]

Poor neighbourhoods with immigrants have plenty of cheap healthy food in America. Those areas that’s don’t lack it because there’s no demand for it.

> The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States

> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w24094

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...

[User23]

I haven't noticed an overwhelming systemic bias in the startup community, have you? Why wouldn't it work? Are you saying VCs won't invest in such an obviously worthy cause because they are racially or class biased?

Are you saying that the demand just doesn't exist? That people in food deserts just want to be unhealthy because of some unspecified and perhaps unknowable reasons? I don't get it.

[8456523]

If it were as easy as bootstrapping a retail food business by buying or renting a few food trucks, someone would've done it already. Food trucks are not exactly new.

(The reason for my earlier mention of bias is because those that haven't understood that usually believe the obstacle to be systemic bias.)