FareRX

FareRx is a food-first healthcare company. We serve Medicare Advantage members managing diet-related chronic illness, under a direct commercial payer contract. More than 120,000 medically tailored grocery deliveries to date, with a 99.69% delivery success rate.

I have been a mission-driven entrepreneur my entire career. My earlier work was in environmental impact. Over time I fell in love with the human impact of Food is Medicine and the opportunity to do real work inside the healthcare system. I started FareRx in 2022, right before my third of four kids was born, when I was as tuned in as I had ever been to what my own family was eating. The ingredients, the nutrition, what actually showed up on the plate every day. That is the same attention we try to bring to every member we serve.

Most Food is Medicine organizations start nonprofit and work their way toward payer contracts. We started inside a payer contract and built the clinical, technology, and member hospitality infrastructure around it.

Our members are concentrated in Medicare Advantage plans across Southeastern Pennsylvania, with a focus on chronically ill enrollees eligible under the Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill (SSBCI) pathway and members receiving the Part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS). Clinical services are delivered by a physician and our in-house clinical team, covering medical nutrition therapy (MNT), diabetes self-management education (DSME), and chronic care management (CCM). In-person teaching kitchen programming runs out of our Philadelphia facility. Every piece of the program is built on a foundation of trust, because trust drives adherence and adherence drives outcomes.

Food is Medicine is the integration of food-based interventions into paid, prescribed, documented, and measured clinical care. For us the definition is operational, not rhetorical. If a payer is not paying for it, a clinician is not ordering it, a member is not using it, and an outcome is not being measured, it is not Food is Medicine. It is a pilot.

Measurement matters most. Without outcomes there is no path to scale. Without scale, Food is Medicine is a handout, not a hand up. It stops being a linical intervention. The operators who move this field forward are the ones who can show up every week, hit SLAs, move clinical markers, and prove it in the data.

FareRx operates two linked programs under one roof.

The first is our supplemental benefits program. Weekly medically tailored grocery delivery for Medicare Advantage members with chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and hypertension. Most members qualify through SSBCI, and a significant share are Part D LIS. Members are identified through claims and enrolled directly by FareRx.

The second is our cardiometabolic care program, a clinically managed intervention for members who need more than a grocery delivery. The purpose is simple: remove barriers for the member and arm our clinical team with as much real-time information as possible to deliver the best care available. That means registered dietitian-led MNT, DSME, CCM, and RTM. It means remote patient monitoring through connected devices that let our clinicians track outcomes and adjust nutrition plans or grocery orders in real time. It means point-of-care testing, because without an accurate real-time baseline we do not know what we are measuring toward. And it means in-person teaching kitchen sessions that anchor the program in real relationships.

Both programs share the same operating philosophy. A member hospitality model, married to in-person touchpoints, built on trust. Trust drives adherence. Adherence drives outcomes. The program works when members eat the food, engage with the clinical team, and keep coming back. Everything we build is optimized for that.

FareRx is a for-profit company, and we are bootstrapped. We have not raised outside capital, which has given us total control over how we grow and where we focus. Revenue today comes from direct commercial payer contracts and clinical services billing.

The outlook has more tailwinds than headwinds, and most of them are policy-driven.

On the federal side, the CMS CY2027 Medicare Advantage Final Rule is tightening expectations around supplemental benefit utilization, including point-of-sale verification for food-related debit card benefits and a request for information on nutrition and well-being benefits. That raises the quality bar, which favors operators who can document what they are actually delivering. The SSBCI pathway remains the most durable authority for MA plans to cover food as a chronic condition intervention, and we expect that authority to broaden rather than narrow over the next

several rule cycles.

On the state side, Section 1115 waivers have become the second major lane for Food is Medicine to enter Medicaid. More than a dozen states now have approved 1115 demonstrations that can include medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, or produce prescriptions as covered interventions. In our home state, CMS approved the Food is Medicine component of Pennsylvania’s “Keystones of Health” 1115 demonstration in December 2024. Governor Shapiro’s 2026-27 budget proposes $900,000 in state funding for a Food is Medicine pilot, which unlocks federal match for a total of $2.3 million. The national picture matters because it means an operator with a working playbook can plug into multiple states in parallel, rather than starting from scratch in each one.

The third lane is employers. We do not currently hold employer contracts, but the opportunity is substantial, and we are building several employer-focused pilots right now. Innovative companies want to get ahead of the curve on their employee benefit costs, and they are willing to invest directly in their employees through nutrition education, medically tailored meals, and grocery delivery rather than waiting for the cost to show up in the claims report. Self-insured employers control their own healthcare spend and can move faster than any payer. The Food is Medicine operators who figure out that channel early will have a meaningful advantage.

Margin compression in MA is the near-term risk. Some plans are pulling back on supplemental benefits. We are betting that clinical integration, documented outcomes, and operational reliability are the three things that survive the compression.

Operational metrics: delivery success rate, on-time delivery, member retention, contact center responsiveness, enrollment activation rate, and weekly engagement rate.

Clinical metrics: A1C, blood pressure, weight, medication adherence, food security status (Hunger Vital Sign), and self-reported dietary quality. Clinical engagement metrics include MNT session completion, DSME module completion, and RPM adherence.

Utilization and cost metrics: ED visits, inpatient admissions, 30-day readmissions, and PMPM cost trend versus a matched non-participant cohort. We recently published a matched pairs study at outcomes.farerx.com showing directional improvement on utilization markers for engaged members.

The hardest part of this work is the data layer. Claims data arrives with lag, usually 90 to 120 days. Linking grocery delivery engagement to clinical outcomes requires sustained data-sharing agreements that take months to negotiate and longer to stabilize. What would make tracking

easier across the field: standardized Food is Medicine HCPCS codes (the Coding4Food initiative is on the right track), a common Food is Medicine data exchange specification, and default contractual language for bidirectional claims and clinical data sharing between payers and Food is Medicine operators.

a. Operational readiness is the cost of entry. Working with a health plan means receiving PHI. That requires HIPAA compliance, CMS compliance, SOC 2 Type 2, and a full stack of systems and infrastructure in place before a single member is served. We made that investment upfront. It was expensive and slow, and it is why we are seen as a legitimate national vendor rather than a pilot or a community-based organization. Food is Medicine operators who skip this layer cap out at the pilot stage.

b. Member hospitality is the real clinical intervention. Trust drives adherence. Adherence drives outcomes. If members do not eat the food we send them, nothing else we do matters. If we cannot hit the outcomes, the Food is Medicine category as a whole loses steam and loses funding. Every interaction is a chance to build or break that trust, whether it is a delivery, a phone call, a kitchen class, or a check-in.

c. Build for measurement from day one. Most Food is Medicine programs retrofit measurement after the fact. That produces thin data and weak proof. We designed around the outcomes from the beginning, across operational, clinical, and utilization metrics, so the data tells a complete story when payers or policymakers ask.

The MA supplemental benefit pathway, the CY2027 rule, 1115 waivers in more than a dozen states, the federal push on Food is Medicine coding, and the emerging employer lane are converging to create a real opening for operators who can deliver clinical-grade Food is Medicine at scale. That opening did not exist five years ago. It may not look the same five years from now.

Food is Medicine has forced discipline on us that we would not have chosen on our own. Running a direct commercial Medicare Advantage contract means we cannot wave at outcomes. Every month is a referendum on whether the model works. That pressure has made us a better clinical, technology, and operations company than we would be otherwise.

Trust drives adherence. Adherence drives outcomes. Outcomes drive scale. Scale is how Food is Medicine stops being an idea and starts being infrastructure. That is the work we want to keep doing.