Kudos to these young entrepreneurs for creating a successful product and service.

The Brattleboro Reformer reports.

Vt. college students create unusual food program

A group of Middlebury College students has created an unusual program that sells high-quality food, including meat and produce, to local residents at a fraction of the cost for the same products at a supermarket.

It’s not free, it’s separate from area food shelves and there are no income restrictions, but the group sells its products through area community organizations and churches, aiming for a clientele that doesn’t always eat, or know how to prepare, healthy meals.

Each of the boxes the group sells contains enough food for a family of four for a week and a number of healthy recipes. The cost is $35.

“The stuff that’s in the box is good. It’s real good stuff,” said Wilma Hallock, 82, of Lincoln, who heard about Middlebury Foods while visiting HOPE in Middlebury and picking up food for her and her husband. “You can make quite a few meals out of that.”

One of the organizers, Harry Zieve-Cohen, a Middlebury junior from New York City who is majoring in literary studies, noted that it provides “supermarket-quality food at fast-food prices to Vermonters who have a hard time purchasing food and getting by day-to-day, who face challenges.”

“We’re giving them an opportunity to have healthier food on their tables and to be healthier people and be happier,” he said, “and have more time on their hands because they don’t have to go to the grocery store as much.”

Even though the group Middlebury Foods is set up as a nonprofit, it’s not a charity. Still Zieve-Cohen said he and the other organizers worried their efforts would come across as paternalistic.

“We aren’t a charity organization that is giving people handouts, we are giving people an opportunity,” he said. “People choose to use our products. This business only works if people like it. If they don’t like our food they don’t buy it, the business fails, we’re done.”