Salad Days

Mission

Good Food Works (“GFW”) provides paid work, career development, and wealth building opportunities to individuals overcoming barriers to employment, including formerly homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals, through the operation of programs that increase access to affordable healthy food in low-income communities.

History

The team behind GFW began developing experimental programming at the intersection of healthy food access and workforce development at The Doe Fund in 2012. Past projects include urban gardens, a locally-sourced pop-up bakery, a farm-to-table logistics service, and an in-depth feasibility study for a large-scale local produce processing and distribution hub.

Building upon its learnings from these projects, GFW developed a salad social enterprise concept that launched as a pilot project in 2020. Based on the early success of the pilot, GFW incorporated as a non-profit subsidiary of The Doe Fund in 2021 in order to further develop the program and begin to establish a foundation for expansion.

In early 2025, GFW spun-off to enter a new chapter as an independent start-up organization.

Programming

GFW’s core program, Salad Days, is a non-profit salad enterprise that uses mission-driven hiring, innovative distribution strategies, and local ingredient sourcing to increase access to affordable fresh food and gainful employment in underserved communities.

Through free distribution programs, pop-ups markets offering subsidized pricing, and smart-fridge vending machines, Salad Days brings its own line of seasonal grab & go salads to public spaces and high-need constituencies throughout New York City, with a primary focus on Central Brooklyn.

Salad Days’ culinary team produces and packages its salads daily in a commercial kitchen at the Peter Jay Sharp Center for Opportunity in Bushwick, ensuring a consistent local supply of fresh and nutrient-dense meals for its clients.

By co-designing its recipes with local chefs from the communities it serves and soliciting frequent feedback directly from customers, Salad Days is able to offer culturally-appropriate options and remain highly responsive to the expressed needs of those it serves.

Sliding scale pricing ensures lower-income customers can access its food and higher-income customers can help to support the organization’s mission and long-term sustainability.

As part of this tiered pricing strategy, Salad Days maintains a small corporate catering operation, expanding its reach to local businesses and establishing a sustainable secondary source of revenue that helps to supplement the philanthropic support that enables the majority of its programming.

In collaboration with Brownsville Community Culinary Center, Ready, Willing & Able, and Drive Change, Salad Days integrates job training and employment for New Yorkers overcoming barriers to employment into its culinary operations, helping staff and trainees build gainful careers in the food service industry.