Shoebuy.com founder teams with ex-Yankee Group chief to deliver healthier school lunches

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Their Charlestown-based start-up, Smart Lunches, is already delivering lunches at about $4 or $5 a pop to eleven Boston-area schools and daycare centers, and Green talks about building Smart Lunches into a nationally-known brand: "There's a national market available here, and you can't think of a brand that has national awareness around providing nutritious food to kids when they're away from home." The target market, as she sees it, is about 30 million kids between the ages of two and eighteen who don't participate in school lunch programs.

Savitz left Shoebuy.com, the online footwear retailer owned by InterActive Corp., last summer. He was introduced to the two founders of Smart Lunches, Cathy Goldman and Susan Frigoletto, as a prospective advisor. (Savitz's wife had served on the board of the Charlestown Mothers Association with Frigoletto.) Though the pair had only begun delivering lunch to schools in the Boston area last September, Savitz decided to make an offer to acquire the company just before the end of 2011. He knew Green (pictured at right) from serving alongside her on the MITX board; she had vacated the CEO's office at Yankee Group, a Boston tech research firm, at the end of 2010, and was thinking about next steps. She signed on to run the business around the same time that Savitz was wrapping up the acquisition.

Green says, "I was really captivated, partly because it's so different" -- she'd earlier run Cambridge Energy Research Associates and been a top executive at Forrester Research -- "and partly because the mission is so compelling. The company is doing something worthwhile, and there is a huge scale opportunity."