In January 2026, CommonWealth Kitchen became Massachusetts’ first USDA K-12 commodity foods diversion processor. The designation sounds wonky and bureaucratic, but the impact is anything but. It allows school districts to send their USDA-supplied bulk ingredients — those giant cans of diced tomatoes, bags of flour and bulk beans — to our Boston-based food-manufacturing social enterprise to turn into prepared items, such as pizza sauce or muffins.
