It’s been seven years since the idea for Rebel Ventures first took root after Jarrett Stein, nutrition teacher at George W. Pepper Middle School asked his students a simple question: “How would you create a healthier school?” Their answer: Create healthier school snacks.
A couple years later Stein and his students—then high schoolers—started their healthy food company, serving up what they call “Healthy Deliciousness” to students and residents from their base in West Philly. Since we first wrote about them in 2016, Rebel Ventures has served their premiere Rebel Crumbles, a healthy crumble cake, to every public school in Philadelphia for breakfast, on two different occasions—part of an effort to make Rebel a staple of Philly public schools. “We want every school, every child, to have access to healthy deliciousness, which is really just good food that you want to eat,” says Stein.
This summer, the team at Rebel Ventures was hard at work creating and testing new recipes in their kitchen at the Center for Culinary Enterprises, gearing up for the new school year and updating their professional resumes for college. The high school entrepreneurs are the R&D team, the cooks, the accountants, the designers; they rotate through each department, learning business skills, how to work as a team, how to lead others—all abilities they’ll take with them beyond the granola. The Rebel Crew have big plans for their own futures and the future of Rebel Ventures.
In the spring, the Rebel Ventures crew was featured in a documentary by WHYY Media Labs, in partnership with Lea Elementary School.
Watch the video here.