Pass the Love

2021 Progress Report

PHA launched ‘Pass the Love w/ Waffles + Mochi’ in March 2021— a campaign with former First Lady Michelle Obama to spread the joy of food and cooking to families around the country.

The campaign brings parents and children together around the joy of food, tied to positive, family-centric messages of love and food from Netflix’s latest kids show, Waffles + Mochi, engaging both the for profit and non-profit sectors. We also worked with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to do research on the effectiveness of the program in Philadelphia and Fresno. That research will be released in the fall of 2022, and will help guide our innovative meal kit work moving forward.

Learn more about Pass the Love’s impact with this short video featuring former First Lady, Michelle Obama.

What’s in a Pass the Love Meal Kit?

Meal kits were sourced and assembled by Genuine Foods and included enough fresh produce and shelf-stable ingredients to create a month’s worth of plant-forward meals that were fun and fast to make at home. The recipes provided were also easy to replicate.

What We Learned

PHA is a learning organization, and we commit to learning from each of the programs we create, and taking those learnings to build on all of our other work. We learned so much from the Pass the Love campaign, including:

QUALITY MATTERS.

Many of the families we reached talked about how much the freshness and quality of the produce surprised them. It wasn’t something they had access to on a regular basis.

PEOPLE LIKE EATING VEGETABLES AS AN ENTREE.

Many of the families we reached talked about how much the freshness and quality of the produce surprised them. It wasn’t something they had access to on a regular basis.

QUALITY MATTERS.

Many of the families we reached talked about how much the freshness and quality of the produce surprised them. It wasn’t something they had access to on a regular basis.

President and CEO of PHA, Nancy E. Roman sat down for an interview with former First Lady and PHA Honorary Chair, Michelle Obama, to talk about the Pass the Love campaign during our Food Equity Summit. You can watch that conversation below.

OUR PASS THE LOVE PARTNERS

Pass the Love would not have been a success without our local distribution partners in each of the five cities. Here are the local partners we worked with and what they helped us accomplish in 
each city: