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Both Richmond and Tobey, who met in the Berkeley MBA Program, had worked on school food service programs and arrived at Haas already interested in starting a school lunch venture. As they progressed through the MBA curriculum, weaving new-found knowledge into their business plan, they were better able to pinpoint their company's niche and to identify the principles by which it would operate.

"We might have started Revolution Foods anyway, but it would have been very different." Tobey says, noting that Haas Lecturer Will Rosenzweig was a key advisor and that many parts of the Revolution Foods business plan were written in his Social Entrepreneurship class. Tobey also credits Haas Senior Lecturer Sara Beckman's New Product Development course for helping Revolution Foods to conduct customer needs research and Adjunct Professor Mario Rosati's New Venture Finance Course for giving them the skills to structure venture financings and read term sheets. " Our guiding principles and the ways in which we conduct business are something we solidified in the Berkeley MBA Program," says Tobey.

Those principles include using environmentally responsible practices like composting, providing benefits to employees, and paying above-living wage compensation. Most importantly, they include helping kids incorporate healthy eating into everyday life.

Once a month Revolution Foods tries to serve something that kids may not have eaten before to inspire them to think in new ways about food. "There is a glimmer in a kid's eye when he realizes, 'Hey I like brown rice!' that shows us he is getting engaged with food," says Richmond. For both Richmond and Tobey that glimmer is the spark of a revolution.