Founded in 2020 by Melissa and Shandra MacMaster during the COVID-19 pandemic, Food For Thought Software Solutions was created to ensure vulnerable children across Canada had access to nutritious food. The company initially focused on providing reliable, sustainable, and discreet solutions that helped streamline school food and nutrition initiatives during a time of significant need.
Today, their software serves as a digital operating system for school food programs, providing infrastructure that helps organizations modernize operations, scale efficiently, and make informed decisions through data and analytics.
As the company continued to grow, it identified an opportunity to strengthen its technology with nutrition research expertise, ensuring school meal programs could make evidence-based decisions that support children’s health and well-being.
Finding the right research partner
Food For Thought Software Solutions met with Danielle Goodfellow, Industry Liaison Officer at Mount Saint Vincent University to learn about the company’s research challenges. Given his extensive experience in child nutrition and school food programming, Dr. Bohdan Luhovyy, Professor of Applied Human Nutrition at MSVU, was a natural choice to lead the collaboration.
Dr. Luhovyy’s research focuses on functional foods and food-based strategies to reduce childhood obesity risk. His commitment to developing meals that are not only nutritious but also enjoyable for children, recognizes that healthy food can only make a positive impact if students are willing to eat it.
Dr. Luhovyy has a long history of supporting school nutrition programs. As former President and Director of the Breakfast Program Association in Fairview, he involved hundreds of nutrition and dietetic students in local school breakfast initiatives over the years. With support from Medavie Health Foundation, Dr. Luhovyy, Dr. Shannan Grant, food scientist Dr. Priya Kathirvel and registered dietitian Antonia Harvey developed 50 healthy and tasty recipes for school breakfast programs that are now freely available at msvu.ca/breakfast.
Dr. Luhovyy runs the MSVU Appetite Lab, where he and his team collaborate with community and industry partners to develop and test recipes that meet dietary guidelines and school meal standards. The prepared recipes are tested with children, who are some of the harshest known judges; they review the meals for their pleasantness helping researchers to further improve them.
This combination of nutrition science, recipe development, and real-world testing made the Appetite Lab an ideal partner for Food For Thought’s next stage of innovation.
From research to impact
Together, Food For Thought Software Solutions and the MSVU Appetite Lab are developing Nourish ED, a data-driven software tool designed to monitor the nutritional quality of school meals and analyze children’s eating habits.
Dr. Luhovyy and his team will be assisting with creating a digital framework for the evaluation of school meal recipes and developing tasty school meal recipes that meet provincial and national food and dietary guidelines. By integrating academic research with technology, the collaboration ensures Nourish ED is grounded in evidence-based approaches to child health and school food programming. The platform will help schools make more informed decisions about meal planning and better understand children’s eating habits. The results of this work could help shape the future of school meal programs across Nova Scotia and beyond, ensuring children have access to healthier, more appealing food options.
“Working with Dr. Luhovyy and the Appetite Lab team lets us ground Nourish ED in real nutrition science, so every school meal recipe we help evaluate truly supports children’s health and long-term wellbeing,” said Melissa MacMaster, CEO of Food For Thought Software Solutions. This is a tool we can’t wait to roll out, we’re eager to pilot Nourish ED with more recipes from the national school food program,” said Melissa MacMaster, Founder and CEO, Food For Thought Software Solutions.
“The collaboration with Melissa MacMaster and Food For Thought Software and their partners provides a unique opportunity to create a new experience for parents and children ordering their school meal based on multiple factors contributing to their decision and at the same time providing the information and education in the most approachable and intuitive form. The other unique piece of the project is getting feedback from children right at school, ensuring they liked the food and are not hungry, helping school meal programs learn what works and what can be further improved,” added Dr. Luhovyy.
The partnership demonstrates how academic research and industry innovation can work together to address complex public health challenges and support healthier outcomes for children and families.