Brianna Brown, chief product officer at City Fresh Foods in Boston. (Photo/video credit: Susan Young)

City Fresh Foods has long served nutritious meals to students, seniors, and daycare centers in Greater Boston’s under-resourced communities. But when the company saw an opportunity to do more by expanding into the medically tailored meals space, they turned to a team of HBS students for guidance on go-to-market strategies.

“The experience of working with the HBS team on this study was great, very strategic, and didn't take away from our main operations,” says Brianna Brown, chief product officer at City Fresh Foods, which serves about 30,000 meals in the region daily. “We had this wealth of information that was presented to us. The students suggested ideas that we had never thought of before, and we were able to decide, is this something that we want to pursue?”

City Fresh Foods is one of many enterprises that have benefited from the innovative ideas and business expertise of second-year MBA students in HBS’s field course Scaling Minority Businesses. Launched in Fall 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice reckoning sparked by George Floyd’s murder, the elective was designed to help Black-owned businesses in Boston not just survive, but thrive, while reinforcing for MBA students how business can be a force for good in the world.

“Businesses across America were having a terrible time. Statistics showed that minority-owned businesses were failing at a disproportionately higher rate,” recalls Senior Lecturer Henry McGee. To tackle the issue, he and fellow senior lecturers Archie Jones and Jeff Bussgang created Scaling Minority Businesses.

Today, the course has expanded its partnerships to include businesses owned by underinvested entrepreneurs of color all along the East Coast. Over 12 weeks, students draw from their own professional backgrounds and on insights from their first-year courses as they work to address difficulties minority businesses face, such as access to capital, both financial and social.

Through these partnerships, students deliver practical strategies and solutions for real-world challenges and, ideally, help advance the entrepreneurial journeys of under-resourced leaders. In return, says Jones, “The biggest takeaway for the students is their ability to have an impact on these communities—applying what they've learned in class to something that will help solve some societal ills and have personal and economic benefits as well.”

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