The usual school lunch menu suspects — pizza and chicken nuggets — appeal to some students, but those options may not work for students who are vegetarian or gluten-free. As a result, “the school lunch solution doesn’t really work anymore,” Wise Apple Co-Founder and President Nathan Cooper told PYMNTS in an interview.
To create an alternative for kids with dietary needs, Cooper set out to reinvent the school lunch by offering a kid-focused meal subscription service that accommodates different dietary needs, packaged like a Lunchable. But he wanted to test out the idea before bringing it to market, so he built a splash page with a minimum viable product (MVP) and posted it on a local mom group page on Facebook. He was shocked with the results.
“Optimistically, we were hoping for 10 or 15 responses,” Cooper said. “And we woke up that next morning to 400. That was the first ‘holy cow, there’s something here’ moment.”
After coming to that realization, Cooper got the confirmation he needed to start work in earnest on Wise Apple. The service, which is offered on a subscription and à la carte basis, delivers fresh and prepackaged, kid-focused lunches and snacks to families in the Midwest. To ensure Wise Apple meets the dietary needs of its customers, its menu includes gluten-free and vegetarian options. But it’s not the only company that offers meal subscriptions designed for kids.
The Secret Sauce
While there are other services geared toward providing lunches to kids, such as Yumble, Cooper said the company has the first-to-market advantage. But, more importantly, Wise Apple decided to narrow its focus to two specific types of meals.
“We’ve spent two years building our menu,” Cooper said. “And we’re really focused on the lunch aspect and [the] snacking aspect.”
The company uses unique proprietary packaging, which makes its meals more flexible than some of the offerings already on the market. Each meal is modular, meaning that each of the components — the protein, the vegetable, the sweet — come in separate pods within a tray. As a result, kids can open one pod at a time and save others for later if need be. By comparison, other services usually put all parts of the meal in one container.
To have the meals sent to families at home, Wise Apple offers multiple distribution options. Consumers can have the meals delivered to their doors through couriers such as FedEx — depending on their location. But Wise Apple has also launched its pods in brick-and-mortar stores in Chicago. That venture has been well-received and has introduced families to the concept of a Wise Apple lunch.
“We’re selling the pods individually in these retail stores,” Cooper said. “People are buying a pod or two as [a] snack and coming back and buying the whole lunches.”
The Kid Food Market
Yumble, for example, offers prepared meals for breakfast and dinner — as well as snacks — for kids. The site was live in 26 states on the East Coast as of last year and has plans to expand to the West Coast sometime in the first half of 2018.
HelloFresh’s Co-Founder Dan Treiman, who joined the company in December 2016, helped to officially launch Yumble last summer. Yumble is a subscription-based program that charges a fixed rate meal with options for six meals a week, 12 meals a week or 24 meals a week. In addition to fully cooked meals, each box comes with activity sheets, collectible reward coins and trivia cards.
“It’s very similar to the experience of HelloFresh or Blue Apron, but without any cooking required,” Yumble Co-Founder David Parker said. Yumble does have some competition in the market, including Scrumpt Fresh, a prepared lunch service for kids that’s currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago-based startups Nurture Life along with Wise Apple.
The Road Ahead
For now, Wise Apple distributes its meals in the Midwest — in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and St. Louis. In the future, Cooper said he might expand the service further east or west if the opportunity arises. But, as of now, “I think there’s a big business to had here in the Midwest,” Cooper said.
As far as marketing is concerned, Cooper said his own customers promote the service and essentially become evangelists for the brand. Still, Cooper wants to gain more brand recognition for Wise Apple and become a part of a family’s routine.
“We want to integrate ourselves in the supply chain of a family and create a trusted brand that families see Wise Apple as, ‘Hey, this is a better-for-you, tasty snack [or] meal lunch option’ … and I think we’re on our way to doing that,” Cooper said.
The 119th Congress has now been seated, and is poised to consider, to take up — or to scuttle — financial services legislation that may touch on everything from credit cards to earned wage access (EWA) to digital assets.
The incoming majorities belong to the Republicans, of course, and it’s no secret that president-elect Trump and other members of his party have expressed misgivings about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the roles and scope of those agencies are as yet undetermined.
The House Financial Services Committee now is being chaired by Rep. French Hill, R-Ark. The Senate Banking Committee is being chaired by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.
As for what may still be considered “outstanding”:
Front and center will be what happens with the Credit Card Competition Act. It’s been a long road for the CCCA, which, among other things, would enable card payments to be routed over at least one network that competes with Mastercard and Visa. Since being introduced in 2023, the act has been stalled in Congress, and should it be taken up again, there’s no surety that it would make it through into law, but it may indeed come up for debate. Now vice president-elect JD Vance had signed on to the bill.
At issue will be the ways in which the bill would change the dynamics of the card industry. Supporters say that the routing provisions would open up competition. But as Karen Webster noted in a recent column, “Notwithstanding a lack of understanding of how dual routing would work for credit card transactions, the flaw in Sen. Durbin’s bill is a lack of understanding of how the current credit card ecosystem works. And, more fundamentally, how platform ecosystems ignite and scale — and are monetized.”
Separately, the Earned Wage Access Consumer Protection Act would define EWA providers and sets strict operational boundaries, specifically regulating both employee-sponsored programs and direct-to-consumer offerings.
There have been various attempts to have legislation that would set frameworks for digital asset markets to be structured. One bill, the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act passed in the House but did not make it through the Senate. The act would, among other things, set standards for digital assets and consumer protections, and segregation of funds.
Crypto and artificial intelligence (AI), of course, will also be on the agenda.
In an interview with PYMNTS, Mike Katz, a partner in Manatt, Phelps and Phillips Financial Services Group, said that “despite the razor-thin Republican majorities, there is a growing bipartisan consensus in Congress around the need for thoughtful, innovation-focused crypto and AI legislation,” adding, “It will be interesting to see if any digital asset bills are part of the tax-and-border-focused reconciliation package already being discussed in Congress. I’d expect a strong stablecoin bill to move quickly given existing bipartisan support.”
And he added: “Keep an eye out early in 2025 for a repurposed or chopped up version of the pro-crypto bill FIT21 [which passed the House with a large bipartisan majority in May]. Regardless of form or timing, new legislation will finally provide clarity on the questions of whether crypto assets are ‘securities’ or ‘commodities’ … and on which regulatory authority is charged with oversight.”