New “Healthy Vending Machine” Company 6AM Health Partners with Tuck Student Team

In his first few jobs, this is clear. He began working in the therapeutics space, and then switched to diagnostics and health care technology. But in 2017, he went in a different direction. That’s when he founded 6AM Health, a specialty food business that focused on green juices. He soon expanded to fresh salads and meals, delivering them directly to his customers in the Boston Metro area before 6 a.m. For Callow, food is the first medicine—both preventative and healing. “I realized that problems like obesity have a lot of co-morbidities,” he says, “so if we use food to minimize obesity, we can prevent a lot of other diseases at the same time.”

Now Callow is partnering with Tuck students on a First-Year Project (FYP) to take his company to scale. As he learned more and more about the food industry, he discovered that success is mostly about logistics. You can have the freshest, best-tasting food, but without an efficient way to deliver it to customers, it’s not worth much. So instead of selling food to individual customers through a subscription delivery service, 6AM Health will begin installing “fresh fridges”—think healthy vending machines—at locations across the Northeast. The first one was installed in March at Tuck, in the PepsiCo Dining Room. He’s counting on the First-Year Project students to bring an entrepreneurial focus to the Fresh Fridge, testing pricing and product combinations and solving logistical problems.

“Having the FYP team will be incredibly helpful,” Callow says. “What we need to do is continue learning and sorting out what people like and don’t like. And I would love this to eventually be something like TuckStuff or theBOX, where it’s student-run and it becomes a permanent operation there.”

Elizabeth Kachavos T’20 knows theBOX well: she’s worked there since arriving at Tuck last summer. The FYP with 6AM Health was a natural choice for her, since she’s interested in the food industry and looking for more opportunities for real-world learning in that sector. “We’ve seen there’s a great demand for healthier fresh food on campus—especially on the weekends when the dining hall is closed,” she says. “I’d love to play a role in increasing those options at Tuck.”

Another member of the FYP team is Elisa Scudder D’14, T’20. She gravitated toward 6AM Health because she’s interested in product entry strategy and market entry. “This fits that niche perfectly,” she says. “It’s not too early-stage: the business model is set up but it’s just expanding into this new market.” Scudder is also excited about working on a project that can have a real impact on campus. “We’re going to physically see what we’re working on and hear our classmates talk about how they like it or don’t like it,” Scudder says.

At first, the Fresh Fridge will be stocked with food prepared at 6AM Health’s kitchen outside Boston, and will be re-stocked every week. During the course of the FYP, Callow hopes the team can find a more local farm to partner with, and the most efficient and cost-effective way to prepare and package the items. It might involve working with the Byrne servery, or the team from theBOX.

“This FYP is really about e-ship,” Callow says. “What’s the best, most sustainable way to keep this going? I’m also just fired up to work with Tuckies.”

This story will appear in the summer 2019 issue of Tuck Today magazine.