Devon Klatell joined The Rockefeller Foundation in 2013. As Vice President, Food Initiative, she oversees the Foundation’s Good Food Strategy in the United States, working to advance a more nourishing, regenerative and equitable domestic food system. Currently, Ms. Klatell is collaborating with schools, healthcare insurers, hospitals, food service businesses, policy makers and other funders to increase consumption of healthy, sustainably produced foods by underserved communities. In addition, Ms. Klatell leads our work on the True Cost of Food, which analyzes the hidden costs of the food system on health, equity and the environment.
Prior to taking on her current role, Ms. Klatell led our Yieldwise initiative which invested in preventing wasted food in the U.S., to eliminate the enormous environmental, social, and economic costs caused by food waste. She also led the Foundation’s Strategic Planning team, which designed implementation models, resource plans, risk assessments and impact targets for the Foundation’s global initiatives. In that role, Devon worked on the Foundation’s initiatives to address energy poverty, connect unemployed African youth with the digital economy, and reduce postharvest losses. Before joining the Foundation, Devon was a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners and at Booz & Company. In these roles, she advised clients from a range of sectors on strategic, organizational, and employee engagement issues.
Ms. Klatell holds a B.A. from Harvard University in cognitive psychology and an M.A. in food systems from New York University, where she researched behavioral economics in addition to a broad array of cultural, historic, economic, and regulatory food issues.
Authored Content
Oct 30 2023 Perspective Food Is Medicine Enhances Health While Slashing Health Care Costs Donna Lawson, a former school principal struggling with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, discovered the transformative power of medically tailored groceries—a cornerstone of the emerging Food is Medicine movement, in working with her health care team. These specialized food programs aim to treat or prevent diseases through nutrition, providing patients with meals or groceries targeting their specific […]
Sep 19 2022 Perspective How Can We Make the U.S. Food System Better for People and the Planet? The second-ever White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health is a moment more than 50 years in the making. It’s a historic opportunity to bring together policymakers, non-profit leaders, food and agriculture system stakeholders, and those with lived experiences to tackle some of the most persistent, intersecting, and growing challenges affecting low-income Americans, particularly […]
Nov 09 2020 Perspective The Universal Free School Meal Experiment Last month, the USDA extended a pandemic response program allowing public schools to serve free meals to all children for the 2020-21 school year. This unprecedented move came thanks to the voices of hundreds of organizations across sectors, from public health and education to the environment and social justice, responding to the serious challenges families […]
May 01 2020 Perspective From Behind the School Lunch Counter to the Front Lines of Pandemic Response On May 1st of any other year, we would be marking School Lunch Hero Day by showing gratitude to the tens of thousands of school nutrition professionals who work tirelessly to make sure our children have healthy meals in the course of their school day. Even in the best of times, 30 million children in […]
Mar 11 2020 Perspective Coronavirus and Food Access: Four Questions Every Community Needs to Answer In recent days, photos of empty supermarket shelves have been trending on social media, and the makers of shelf-stable items like dried beans and soups have seen their stock price tick up. As confirmed COVID-19 cases grow in communities across the country, many Americans are heeding the advice of local officials and the Centers for […]