This month, Brad and I joined our fellow founders at MassChallenge in Boston’s Seaport for the July 21 and 22 kickoff of the inaugural Yes/Boston cohort. Morrissey Market is one of 12 innovators selected from 131 applications worldwide, and it was a good day to be in that room.
What Yes/Boston is
Yes/Boston is part of the World Economic Forum’s Yes/Cities initiative, which pairs a city’s toughest local challenges with entrepreneurs who can solve them. Boston’s edition launched in February 2026 under the leadership of the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Citi, and Deloitte. MassChallenge leads the program locally, working with the City of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and more than thirty local organizations.
The challenge called for startups that can deliver measurable impact in Boston across four areas: food production, food logistics, nutritious food and meals, and food and health information access. The cohort was selected through the World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform.
Why we applied
Morrissey Market delivers medically tailored grocery boxes to people managing diet-related health conditions. We build each box to a clinical standard, source from regional farms and producers, and ship directly to the member’s door. Food is Medicine programs work when the food actually arrives, week after week, tailored to the person receiving it. That is the problem we solve.
The evidence behind this model keeps growing. Research on MassHealth’s Flexible Services nutrition program found it was associated with 23% fewer hospitalizations and 13% fewer emergency department visits (Hager et al., Health Affairs, 2024). Boston is where much of this research lives, which makes it the right place to prove what medically tailored groceries can do at scale.
The company we keep
The best part of the kickoff was the room itself. The cohort includes founders working on everything from food recovery to nutrition navigation, and the program partners were at the table with us, including advisors from the Food and Nutrition Innovation Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
What comes next
Over the coming months, we’ll work with MassChallenge and the Yes/Boston partners to deploy and grow our work in Boston, connecting with the health systems, community organizations, and public sector leaders who can put medically tailored groceries in front of the people who need them. Both sides bring real commitment to this: the program opens doors, and we do the work of proving the model in the city.
We’ll share progress as the program moves. If you’re working on food and health in Boston and want to talk, contact us.
Photos: Three Circles Studio for MassChallenge.
