The Initiative
Abbott (NYSE: ABT) and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) are scaling a multi-year "food is medicine" program designed to embed clinical nutrition into primary care at more than 1,500 Community Health Centers (CHCs) nationwide — a network that collectively serves 52.3 million people, including one in seven Americans and one in three rural residents.
The NACHC and Abbott Food for Health Initiative, announced August 17, formalizes a partnership the two organizations piloted beginning in 2023. A 2025 assessment of CHCs across 37 states identified the core friction points: fragmented funding streams, inconsistent staff training, incomplete data collection, and uneven clinical implementation. The new initiative is structured to close those gaps at scale.
Three Program Pillars
The framework rolls out across three interconnected components. The Food for Health Learning Lab delivers structured nutrition-literacy training to CHC clinical and administrative staff, with a focus on implementing and measuring food-based interventions against chronic conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The Food for Health Community of Practice establishes a national peer-learning network so health centers can share protocols, surface operational challenges, and access subject-matter experts. The Food for Health CORE — Certification of Readiness and Excellence — is a voluntary national credential that recognizes CHCs that have built the internal systems and competencies to sustain food-for-health programming.
All three components sit inside NACHC's newly formed Center for Nutrition and Health, which is intended to function as an innovation hub consolidating fragmented food-based clinical efforts into a coordinated policy and program body.
Why It Matters for Foodservice
For the broader food and nutrition industry, the initiative signals growing institutional demand for medically tailored and food-insecurity-focused supply chains at the community level. CHCs operate in the same underserved zip codes where foodservice access gaps are most acute — and programs that embed dietitian-supervised nutrition protocols into primary care visits create downstream demand for shelf-stable nutritious product, fresh produce sourcing partnerships, and food-as-pharmacy SKUs that manufacturers and distributors are increasingly positioning to capture.
The "food is medicine" category has attracted significant attention from health systems, insurers, and CPG companies alike over the past three years, with medically tailored meal programs and produce prescription models expanding rapidly. Abbott's nutritionals portfolio — which includes brands formulated for clinical and recovery settings — gives the company direct commercial relevance in any channel where nutrition and healthcare intersect. As noted by Melissa Brotz, Senior Vice President at Abbott and President of Abbott Fund, the initiative is about "bringing those things together" to make nutrition a core component of disease prevention and chronic-condition management.
Kyu Rhee, MD, MPP, President and CEO of NACHC, framed the effort as building on CHCs' existing leadership in food insecurity work: the partnership is designed to add evidence-based structure and national credentialing to programs many health centers are already attempting to run on patchwork funding. For food and beverage operators and manufacturers tracking institutional nutrition channels, the 1,500-CHC footprint represents a meaningful, if early-stage, distribution and partnership surface — one increasingly backed by both philanthropic capital and federal food-as-medicine policy momentum. Coverage of adjacent healthcare-nutrition convergence trends is available in our nutrition and health and industry trends sections.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
