Healthy food can be hard to come by for truckers. This businesswoman wants to change that.

Jarita Frazier King runs the Natchez Heritage School of Cooking in Mississippi, offering classes in cooking and the history of Southern cuisine. For years, she worked as a caterer, offering her own take on soul food — think plantain chips with mango salsa or spicy Jamaican jerk chicken skewers.

But during the pandemic, she had to close down and find a new job, and she decided on truck driving. She got her commercial driver’s license and hit the road in an 18-wheeler.

To get her CDL, she had to take a physical, “you can’t be insulin-dependent and you cannot have uncontrollable high blood pressure,” she explained. “So I was like, ‘How the heck do they think people supposed to manage this stuff? There ain’t nothing out here to eat. It’s fast food.’”

That lack of healthy food, plus the sedentary nature of driving for long stretches, are two of the reasons that truck drivers have higher rates of certain diseases. Anyone who has taken a cross-country road trip knows that healthy food options are few and far between on the interstate. Your options are largely fast food, hot dogs on those metal rollers, fried chicken under a heat lamp, and so on.

“Over two-thirds of truckers reported having obesity compared to less than one-third of average working adults,” said Bailey Houghtaling, a registered dietician and scientist who has researched this problem. 

Houghtaling said there have been efforts by some trucking companies to educate drivers about good nutrition. But that doesn’t really matter if there are no healthy options at a truck stop.

“In my opinion, there’s two types of truckers: those that eat too much and those that eat too little,” said Daniel Schubert, a long-haul trucker who drives routes like LA to Florida. He’s been eating less, in part, because he’s steering clear of unhealthy options.

“Now, my go-to on the road is nuts, jerky and protein shakes,” he said.  

If he’s lucky, Schubert can stop at a grocery store — but it’s difficult to find parking with an 18-wheeler.

As for Jarita King, her time on the open road was short-lived. She missed her family, and cold weather on routes like Minnesota led her to quit. After the pandemic, she reopened her cooking school. 

Then, one night when she couldn’t sleep, she was scrolling through social media when she saw a business pitch competition. So she submitted an idea:

“I’m developing a pre-prepped meal system for truck drivers, a new innovative way to get healthier options to drivers while they’re out there on the road.” 

King wants to sell her own recipes in truck stops — dishes like black-eyed peas and collard green fritters, served with a sweet pepper dipping sauce. She’s launching the new business next year and hopes to have her first meals available to truckers in Mississippi this summer.