SnackGarden, a serving plate designed by Integrated Product Design (IPD) students at Penn to encourage school children to try healthy foods, has won a 2018 Design Value Award from the Design Management Institute (DMI). The product is the result of a collaboration between the Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative and the IPD program. DMI, a Boston-based collective of design and innovation leaders, cited SnackGarden as “an excellent example of design-led change in the community, involving collaboration on complex challenges with multiple stakeholders in a very crowded public policy and service delivery space.”

In 2013, the Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative, a program of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships focused on providing access to healthy foods in schools, approached Penn’s IPD program about the project. IPD designed plates, produced prototypes and tested them. Then, they collaborated to brand the plates with Rebel Ventures, a youth-led business supported by the Netter Center that develops and distributes healthy snacks.

In 2015, they launched the brand SnackGarden and began distributing the plates to farmers’ markets, grocery stores and elementary schools. To date, SnackGarden plates have been distributed to several non-profit organizations and four elementary schools to be used in tasting programs.