Humana Funds UNF Program Expansion to Address Food Insecurity

Humana has partnered with an academic institution to expand a program that assists seniors with food insecurity challenges.

Meals on Wings is a program at the University of Northern Florida (UNF), developed at the university’s Center for Nutrition and Food Security. The program repackages food that hospitals plan to discard. UNF student volunteers deliver these meals to seniors who have been waitlisted for Meals on Wheels.

The UNF program has already served over 100,000 meals with support from Humana. But with the new seed grants, the program will expand into two new states.

With Humana’s funding and additional grants from UNF, the program will soon be available through the University of Kentucky’s Department of Dietetics and Human Nutrition (UK) as well as Lehman College in New York City through the college’s Department of Dietetics, Foods, and Nutrition.

“We are thrilled to team with UNF to fund and support the expansion of the Meals on Wings program to older adults outside of Florida,” said Caraline Coats, president of Florida Medicare at Humana. “This expansion, which will benefit older adults in the New York City Bronx area and Lexington, Kentucky, who need meal assistance, is one example of Humana’s growing effort across the country to increase meal security for older adults.”

The new locations have the same mission with different goals. The UK Meals on Wings program will target 100 seniors who live in subsidized housing. The program will offer two meals per week for these individuals.

The Lehman program will deliver food to seniors in the Bronx area. Their goal is to serve food including produce that is from minority-owned farms in the region. The program will target 30 seniors.

“The expansion of our Meals on Wings program into two more communities will allow more older adults access to healthy food and help address food insecurity issues in these areas,” said Dr. Curt Lox, dean of the UNF Brooks College of Health. “We are excited to work with both the University of Kentucky and Lehman College, as these institutions have the necessary foundational elements in place to allow this program to be successful and impactful in their communities.”

Food insecurity is one of the three major social determinants of health barriers that seniors face and that payers seek to address.

In 2022, approximately 15 percent of Medicare beneficiaries projected that they would experience food insecurity in the next year, according to a study from Alignment Healthcare. Almost 70 percent of seniors in the survey said that they would use a monthly grocery allowance and most seniors highly valued grocery allowances as a benefit, above telehealth or virtual care.

Humana, in particular, has focused on addressing food insecurity. This social determinant of health was at the core of the health equity strategy that the payer unveiled in February 2023.

The payer promised to fund Black collegiate entrepreneurs’ nutrition and community health strategies, support the Community Farm Alliance of Kentucky’s Food is Medicine program, and fund various organizations that address food insecurity locally.

But Humana is not alone. Payers like Aetna, Cigna, and Elevance Health have directed funding toward food insecurity in schools, underserved areas, and urban regions.