Tens of thousands of meals come out of City Fresh Foods in Roxbury every day. The prepared foods company was just awarded a $17-million contract to provide meals for Boston Public School students. Co-owner Sheldon Lloyd admits, the contract is a bear but tells Boston 25 News, he’s used to hard work.

Mayor Michelle Wu announced the $17 million contract is the largest non-construction contract the city has ever issued to a certified black-owned business.

“I’m from Boston, this company is 28 years old, my kids have been in the [public school] system. So, for me, it’s more than just a contract,” Sheldon Lloyd said. “We did it to fulfill that mission of being able to feed the kids of Boston and give them something better and different and to make a difference,” he said.

BOSTON (CBS) – Step inside City Fresh’s kitchen and you’ll find a busy operation. Beside the stove, cooks tend to a bubbling kettle of Asian curry. Meanwhile, a line of workers package vegetables and sandwiches.

On Juneteenth, City Fresh Foods celebrated more than one kind of freedom. While the June 19 holiday commemorates final emancipation of African slaves, this Roxbury company was also “freed” from its shareholders, buying them out and becoming fully minority-owned for the first time since opening in 1994.

City Fresh Foods was launched in 1994 out of a kitchen in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Since then, City Fresh Foods has been a staple in the food service community and has addressed food insecurity in Boston by delivering nutritious, delicious and ethnically diverse foods.

In a May 21 report, the U.S. hunger relief organization Feeding America projected that one in eight people in Eastern Massachusetts will experience food insecurity in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a 59 percent increase in those who were experiencing food insecurity before COVID-19.

BOSTON — Today, the Boston City Council unanimously voted to advance a precedent-setting Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) for the city. The policy will transform the way public institutions purchase food by creating a more equitable system. Boston is the first East Coast city to adopt this as a city-wide municipal policy; to date seven GFPP policies have been adopted — from Los Angeles to Chicago to Cincinnati.

Black and Latino people now make up more than a fifth of the state’s population but own just over 3% of businesses with employees — less than half the national rate of Black and Latino business ownership, according to a U.S. Census survey of entrepreneurs released in 2018.