I'm the co-founder and CEO of a new 1:1 food company that sells food bars in supermarkets, coffee shops, colleges and companies nationwide.
What makes our company different from any other company in the market is that for every bar sold, we give a medically-formulated nutrition pack to a malnourished child in a developing country.
We actually started the business to make a dent in the unacceptable situation that there are 200 million malnourished children and that millions die a year.
There is a solution and it is used -- but three million kids still die a year and more grow up with compromised intellectual capacities. It's a resource gap that development agencies and NGO's aren't filling.
When you've seen malnourished kids as I have at Partners in Health sites in Rwanda and Malawi -- and otherwise in Congo and Kenya -- and you know the impact of letting a kid get to 3 years old with preventable cognitive deficits -- that tops them out for the rest of their lives -- you feel compelled to do something tangible to change this picture. There's evidence that those impacts extend through their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.
All that makes it pretty compelling to try to find a way to change those life paths.
So we thought why don't we offer consumers a product choice -- our bars (and other food later) that involved every bar buyer making a simple switch decision -- a purchase decision which would help a kid, save a life -- and still be good for the bar buyer.
The magic of Two Degrees is that Two Degrees is a vehicle for empowering everyone who buys our products to change lives.
My aim is to give away millions and tens of millions of nutrition packs -- the way to do that is to sell millions of food bars.
Prominent NGOs like Partners In Health (the Boston-based NGO started by Paul Farrmer ), Valid Nutrition, Relief International, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, among others, have joined us to let their supporters know that everyday consumer product decisions can change the lives of kids around the world.
It's a combination -- a connection- - that makes so much sense.
Our goal is to help feed 200 million children. Come find out how HERE.