A Fresh Take on School Lunch At SMC's Center for Media and Design
The Everytable-SmartFridge lounge is officially open. This first location is at the Center for Media and Design (CMD) at Santa Monica College (SMC).
Sam Polk is the creator of the Everytable company. The goal is to bring healthy accessible food for everyone that is open to the public. The prices range from two to eight dollars. Although this is the first store to directly impact students, Polk hopes to make Everytable accessible to college campuses within the Los Angeles area.
“The idea that students are trying to make a better life for themselves and figure out their careers and do the hard work without basic needs, support of fresh food, and housing: it’s too hard. We want to make a system to support people trying to make their lives better,” said Polk.
Lizzy Moore, who works for SMC Foundation, and is the SMC Interim Dean of Institutional Advancement, says “I saw an opportunity with Everytable and for our students.”
Yearly, the SMC Foundation donates three to five hundred meals that are distributed to SMC’s food pantry on the main campus as well as CMD. Low-income students receive food vouchers from counselors that can be exchanged for these meals.
SMC is partnered with Santa Monica Westside Legacy Fund, who accounts for ten thousand meals per year to help with the food pantries. In addition, SMC is also united with a campaign called “Feed Their Dream,” who raised 150,000 dollars to assist the food pantries for Santa Monica Students. The goal is to remove barriers for students.
The Everytable lounge is a solution to a year-long struggle of finding vendors suitable for CMD’s campus. SMC’s College (Operational) Planning Committee originally planned for vendor selections in February 2018, but was never established.
“Since we opened CMD we have been trying to provide food-service on campus for our students… something beyond the food trucks on the streets. We wanted... something affordable, nutritious, and easy for students to access… and Everytable lounge checks all those boxes because it’s fresh everyday,” said SMC superintendent Kathryn Jeffery. SMC’s partnership with various companies will contribute not only to students, but to the surrounding Santa Monica area as well.
“The students actually designed the space at the CMD campus while Everytable put the ideas into transformation and placed them into reality,” said Jeffery.