California Business Minute™

Hi, I am Tim Johnson and welcome to the California Business Minute.

FreshWorks is a $200 million public-private partnership loan fund created to increase
access to healthy, affordable food in underserved communities, spur economic development,
and inspire innovation in healthy food retailing. It is a project of the California
Endowment and team of partners

FreshWorks Fund is modeled after the successful Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing
Initiative and developed to align with the National Healthy Food Financing Initiative.
The fund will work directly with grocers on developing new and improved stores to buy
nutritious food. According to FreshWorks partners, the new stores are expected to
create or retain around 6000 jobs in California.

The fund will provide financing to grocery stores and other healthy food retailers
and distributors who meet a subset of skillfully developed program guidelines designed
to move healthy food retailing forward in an affordable and accessible way and
prioritize healthy choices from top to bottom. FreshWorks program guidelines are
different from and go further than other previous efforts. For example: Projects
will get priority points if they don't sell cigarettes, have higher proportion of
healthy food retail and eliminate junk food.

Seed stage financing from The California Endowment included a $30 million mission-
related investment on the debt side and a $3 million grant. In a matter of months
the fund grew to $200 million committed from prominent investors like NCB, Kaiser
Permanente, JP Morgan Chase, and others who felt strongly about the model and
believed in its potential to transform underserved communities into communities of
opportunity.

FreshWorks announcement is a coalition of grocers, major banks, health care entities,
research experts and other partners that came together to solve a problem. The
partners include: The California Endowment, NCB Capital Impact, NCB, Unified Grocers,
California Grocers Association, Kaiser Permanente, Catholic Healthcare West, Calvert
Foundation, Social Compact, Emerging Markets, PolicyLink, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan
Stanley, Bank of America, U.S. Bank, Community Health Councils, The Reinvestment
Fund, and Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles. On the partnership,
Peter Barker, Chairman of California for JP Morgan Chase noted, “This partnership
exemplifies an innovative, integrated approach among industry leaders in philanthropy,
industry, and the community.”

For more information go to www.CAfreshworks.com

I am Tim Johnson and this has been the California Business Minute.