North Carolina Rural Health Transformation Program
Over the past year North Carolina has seen a number of public health programs eliminated across the state, including the North Carolina Healthy Opportunities Pilot in the summer of 2025. The loss of these programs has decreased access to not only health care but also to nutritious food for large segments of North Carolina’s population. Fortunately in December 2025 North Carolina was selected to be part of the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP). As part of this program NC receives $213 million in 2026 and up to $1 billion over 5 years.
Delivering Good Bowls to the Cape Fear region of NC
The Rural Health Transformation Program seeks to improve access to health care services and improve health outcomes for nearly 3 million rural North Carolinians. This investment will improve health care services and improve infrastructure by working through 6 ‘ROOTS’ Hubs throughout the state. With five year goals that include reducing preventable hospital admissions, lowering chronic disease risk, expanding mental health services, and stimulating rural economic development the RHTP plans to:
Launch 6 NC ROOTS Hubs across the state that correspond to the current Medicare regions
Improve chronic disease prevention, detection, and management
Expand behavioral health and substance abuse care
Modernize the rural workforce
Accelerate health technology and innovation to reduce costs for rural health providers
As part of the chronic disease prevention aim of the RHTP, there is a focus on the food is medicine approach which will provide medically tailored meals as well as food for diabetes and hypertension management. During the NC Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP) Equiti Foods was a leading Human Services Organization (HSO) providing over 150,000 Good Bowls to participants in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina - putting us in a great position to participate in the RHTP chronic disease prevention and management goal with our experience in food is medicine approaches.
Chicken Country Captain with brown rice
Through our participation in HOP we developed a full medically tailored meal line that has meals that meet the guidelines for carb-controlled, kidney friendly, and heart healthy meals. Through years of testing and feedback we’ve developed a menu that has a variety of culturally relevant meals as well as some international options to appeal to a wide segment of the population.
Additionally the Equiti Foods’ founder, Dr. Alice Ammerman, is the director of UNC’s Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and brings decades of public health and chronic disease management expertise to the table. Since a large focus of the RHTP is chronic disease prevention and management, Alice’s experience will be important as Equiti Foods endeavors to work with the NC Roots Hubs while the RHTP program takes shape in the coming years.
Equiti Foods built out infrastructure and a food distribution system in the Cape Fear region of NC for the HOP program, and we are able to apply that same scaling capability in the ROOTS Hubs across the state. Additionally, since we already source from farms throughout the state with our partnerships with Farmer Food Share and Happy Dirt, we will help the Rural Health Transformation Program stimulate the rural economies through supporting local farms.
Visiting Wise Farms in Mt. Olive North Carolina to discuss sourcing
Our local sourcing practices, line up of healthy and medically tailored meals, experience with the HOP program, and expertise in public health programs put Equiti Foods in an excellent position to be a leader in the Rural Health Transformation Program in the years to come. The ROOTS Hubs leaders will be determined later in the spring of 2026 at which time we can start collaborating with them to see how Good Bowls can be used as the RHTP begins transforming health care in NC. Stay tuned….
