Louisville Metro government is the latest employer to explore whether providing employees with fresh vegetables decreases health costs and improves worker health.
Over the summer, 41 employees from Louisville Metro government signed up for a pilot employee benefit: weekly deliveries from Rootbound Farm at a discounted rate. This sort of delivery is traditionally called community-supported agriculture, or a CSA.
Louisville Metro health program analyst Jessica Klein said the University of Kentucky surveyed city employees about their daily vegetable intake before the program began, and then after it ended. In the beginning, employees ate an average of four servings a day.
“They really found that we increased our vegetable consumption by two servings a day, which we thought was really important because we kind of made it to that five-to-seven recommended vegetables. People also said that they ate less processed food, like chips or pretzels.”
These employees are part of a larger project at UK. In a recent study of UK employees, researchers analyzed two years worth of medical claims for participants who got CSAs as a workplace benefit. For one year of the study —2015—the group that used CSAs had medical bills that were on average about $400 less than those without the CSA.