Who Will Help Build the Food Stories Black Children Grow Up With?

WANDA is inviting Black food and health businesses to help create a healthier media and food ecosystem for the next generation.

There is a reason a five-year-old can recognize a cereal mascot before she can identify fonio, millet, okra, or the farmer who grew her food.

Someone invested in the story.

For generations, companies have understood that childhood attention has value. Characters make products memorable. Music makes messages stick. Packaging turns ordinary objects into objects of desire. Repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity can become preference long before a child understands that she is being marketed to.

Yet the stories surrounding nourishing foods especially foods rooted in African and African diasporic traditions rarely arrive with anything close to the same cultural machinery.

That imbalance extends beyond food. A 2022 Common Sense Media analysis cited in WANDA’s research found that 62 percent of YouTube videos watched by children ages 8 and younger featured no Black, Indigenous, or other characters of color, while another 10 percent contained shallow or stereotypical portrayals. At the same time, Black creators are increasingly demanding something more ambitious than representation by insertion: worlds in which Black children experience curiosity, joy, vulnerability, adventure, family, and possibility on their own terms.

At WANDA, we believe that conversation should reach all the way to the plate.

What if Black children regularly saw farmers as heroes? What if they met dietitians, chefs, scientists, gardeners, food entrepreneurs, and elders through stories? What if fonio could become as recognizable as a packaged snack, not because someone told children they should eat it, but because they first encountered it through an adventure they wanted to follow?

That is the question behind WANDA’s World. And this August, during Black Business Month and Black Philanthropy Month, WANDA is opening a conversation with Black-owned and mission-aligned food, nutrition, health, agriculture, wellness, retail, media, education, and technology businesses about what it could mean to build that world together.

A Children’s Media Question Is Also a Business Question

Little WANDA is a five-year-old food shero who travels with her best foodie friends to discover foods from Africa and the African Diaspora. A story about fonio, for example, can begin with an adventure and lead a child into geography, agriculture, nutrition, culture, cooking, and family history.

The point is not to disguise nutrition education as homework with better animation.

The point is to make discovery pleasurable. A child might watch Little WANDA learn where fonio grows, then ask a parent to taste it. Another might grow herbs on a windowsill, cook alongside a grandparent, dance to a WANDA movement song, draw a favorite fruit, or submit, through a parent or caregiver, a photo, letter, or video showing a healthy habit the family practiced together.

Over time, those small acts can become something larger: birthdays that celebrate growth rather than simply sugar, family rituals centered around cooking and storytelling, reading challenges connected to food adventures, classroom activities that make agriculture feel relevant, and children beginning to understand that food comes from people, places, histories, and ecosystems, not simply from packages. That ecosystem cannot be built by animators and nutrition educators alone.

It needs a village. And Black businesses already occupy crucial parts of that village.

Black Businesses Do More Than Sell Products. They Carry Culture.

Black entrepreneurship is often discussed almost exclusively through the lens of access to capital: how much Black businesses receive, how much they are denied, and what consumers can do to “buy Black.” Those are necessary conversations. But they are incomplete. Black businesses also possess cultural capital.

A Black-owned food company introducing a grain from West Africa is not simply moving inventory. A Caribbean food entrepreneur preserving a family recipe may be carrying migration history into another generation. A Black farmer growing culturally significant produce is preserving biodiversity alongside memory. A maternal health company, dietitian, grocer, publisher, chef, or wellness brand can become part of the infrastructure families rely on to make health feel possible.

The question, then, is not only whether Black consumers support Black businesses. It is also: What cultural future can Black businesses help support?

For WANDA, that creates possibilities beyond traditional sponsorship. A food company might help families discover an ingredient after Little WANDA encounters it in a story. A grocer might host a tasting or scavenger hunt. A wellness company could help families celebrate a Healthy Happy Habit milestone. A farmer might appear in educational content explaining how a food grows. A healthcare organization could make WANDA’s World resources available in waiting rooms or community health centers. A publisher might help put food stories into the hands of emerging readers.

A partner might join families at a Sisterhood Supper, contribute knowledge to a webinar, support a WANDA Summit conversation, help create a lesson plan, participate in a cultural celebration, provide a meaningful birthday or milestone gift, or help parents turn a WANDA-themed celebration into an experience involving food, movement, music, reading, and family. The relationship can live online and offline because children's lives do.

The Opportunity and the Responsibility

There is an obvious tension here. Children already encounter too much commercial persuasion. So why invite brands into a children’s health ecosystem at all? Because the question is not whether commerce will shape childhood. The more useful question is whether we can build a different model for how business, education, health, and culture interact.

WANDA is not interested in replacing one form of child-directed marketing with another. A logo beside Little WANDA cannot become a shortcut to credibility. A company should not be able to purchase access to children, influence nutrition guidance, collect child data, or turn an educational platform into an advertising funnel.

Because trust cannot be bestowed by a seal. It has to be earned behind it.

From Screen Time to Real Life

Perhaps the most interesting opportunity for businesses is not what happens on the screen at all. WANDA’s World is being designed around a simple idea: The screen should be a doorway, not the destination.

A story should lead somewhere. From screen time to story time. From story time to seed time. From seed time to supper time. From music to movement. From curiosity to cooking. From a child watching a character try something new to that child becoming the role model another child sees.

Imagine Little WANDA asking children across the country and diaspora to share their favorite fruit or heritage food. One family sends a video preparing ackee. Another shows a child tasting fonio for the first time. A grandmother explains how she cooks greens. A farmer introduces children to okra growing in the field. A child receives recognition on her birthday not simply for getting older, but for reaching a reading, gardening, cooking, movement, or healthy-habit milestone.

Those families become more than an audience. They become participants. Businesses can help make participation tangible without owning it. They can provide food for a tasting, books for a reading milestone, seeds for a garden project, ingredients for a family recipe, experiences for a celebration, or expertise that helps parents translate a story into everyday life. Done well, the return is not merely impressions or clicks. It is memory.

The Village Can Be Good Business

There is also a practical case for businesses to pay attention. Families increasingly expect companies to stand for something beyond the transaction. But purpose cannot simply be printed on packaging. Consumers can tell the difference between a campaign built for a heritage month and a relationship built for the long haul.

WANDA’s World offers a different possibility: businesses becoming part of an ecosystem that connects childhood education, family health, cultural storytelling, community engagement, and the development of future food and health leaders.

• A child might first encounter a culturally rooted food through Little WANDA.

• A parent might encounter the company producing it through WANDA’s educational resources.

• A family might taste it together at a Sisterhood Supper.

• An educator might use the accompanying lesson plan.

• A future nutrition student might eventually study the very food system that produced it.

That is not conventional product placement. It is ecosystem building. And perhaps that is one of the most useful roles Black businesses can play in the next chapter of Black philanthropy: not simply writing checks after social problems become crises, but helping construct the cultural conditions that allow healthier futures to emerge earlier.

What Kind of World Do We Want Children to Remember?

Children rarely remember health promotion campaigns. They remember songs.

The meal Nana taught them to make. The book they demanded be read one more time.

The funny character who made them laugh. The first food they thought looked strange and later discovered they loved. Those moments accumulate into childhood. Childhood accumulates into identity. And identity eventually influences what people eat, what they value, what businesses they build, what professions they imagine, and what they believe belongs to them. That is why WANDA’s invitation to Black businesses is intentionally broader than sponsorship.

We are asking who wants to be part of the village surrounding Little WANDA as she helps grow a new crop of healthy eaters, readers, and leaders.

• Who wants to help make farmers visible?

• Who wants children to know foods like fonio, millet, okra, ackee, baobab, coconut, egusi, tamarind, greens, beans, and grains not as exotic curiosities, but as foods carrying science, history, culture, nourishment, and possibility?

• Who wants to help families create celebrations where health and joy are not opposites?

• Who wants to help educators find culturally relevant material they can trust?

• Who wants to help children become not simply consumers of food and media, but curious readers of both?

WANDA does not expect one business to build that future. That is the point of a village.

But villages are not created by sentiment alone. They are created when people, institutions, and businesses decide that something is worth tending together.

This August, WANDA is beginning that conversation. If your business works in food, nutrition, health, agriculture, wellness, education, media, retail, hospitality, technology, or another field that touches the lives of families and you are curious about where you might fit within WANDA’s World, we would like to hear from you.

Just a question worth exploring together: What could we grow if Black businesses helped build the food stories our children grow up with?

To learn more about WANDA’s World and explore partnership opportunities, email hello @ iamwanda.org.