Food Program _
Fuel to Serve
A Robert Irvine Foundation initiative, with USAA as founding sponsor.
Every military family should have a place at the table. By 2031, a million places set.
Fuel to Serve starts with a good meal and opens the door to everything else for service members, veterans, and their families: food they can afford, people they can count on, and well-being that lasts.
Fuel to Serve
The Purpose
Food Is the Front Door
Nobody has to be referred to dinner. A meal is the one thing everyone comes to, which makes the table the most reliable door we have, and one we already know how to open.
Everything Opens From There
A family comes for a meal. What they find on the other side is nutrition they can afford, skills they keep, help claiming benefits they earned, and a room where nobody is sitting alone.
Proven, Now at Scale
These programs are already in the field. Now they connect, so a family who comes for one finds all of them. And we measure what changes from day one.
THE PROBLEM
Every month, a service member and their family run the same math. Rent. Gas. Childcare. Groceries. Only one of those lines can bend, so groceries give.
It is happening more often. In a 2025 survey of more than 10,000 military families, 41.2% could not reliably afford enough food, up from 15.6% two years earlier.
Pay is not the whole story. The pressure comes from life itself: moving every few years, spouses who cannot keep a job through the moves, and food that can be hard to reach even on base. Among active-duty service members, 25.8% had trouble affording food, and the rate was higher for those living on base (30%) than off base (23%).
Food doesn't stay in the kitchen. What service members eat shows up in how they sleep, train, recover and hold it together at home. When they leave the uniform, reliable access to good food isn't guaranteed. Veterans who could not reliably afford enough food were nearly four times as likely to have thoughts of suicide a year later.
Food is where these pressures meet. That makes it the right place to start.
*Military Family Advisory Network, 2025 Military Family 360 Survey. RAND Corporation, congressionally mandated study, 2018 data. Elbogen et al., Archives of Suicide Research, 2023.
The Plan
Nourish
Good food, and the confidence to use it. Chef-led community meals, cooking and nutrition education, dining facility transformation, and pantry partnerships for service members, veterans and their families.
Strengthen
The practical supports that make everything else possible: stability at home, skills, financial footing, and help claiming the benefits they've earned and too often never receive.
Connect
The people around the table. Peer support and shared experience that give service members, veterans, and spouses a network before they need one, whether they're arriving at a new duty station or transitioning to civilian life.
Thrive
Long-term well-being, resilience and purpose that protect mental health through service, transition and beyond.
THE CATALYST
USAA's founding investment made the launch possible, and gave this work the backing to grow strong programs already in the field into one connected effort, starting now.
Through Honor Through Action, a national movement dedicated to taking care of military families, USAA is leading by example. Its role isn't just funding. It's to mobilize others (companies, communities, and citizens) to take action alongside us and help this work reach further than any one organization could alone.
Fuel to Serve brings that movement to the kitchen table. For a family, it means a meal that leads somewhere: skills they keep, help with the household budget, people who show up again next week, and support that lasts beyond one hard month. The Robert Irvine Foundation runs Fuel to Serve and delivers its programs. By 2031, it will reach one million members of the military community across fifty installations and communities, supported by a network of gathering places built for people to return to, not service counters.
Scale like that takes more than one company. USAA is the first. There is room at the table for yours.
More Food Programs
Breaking Bread with Heroes
We’re showing love to our service members, veterans, and first responders by providing delicious meals.
Let’s Chow
We are empowering veteran entrepreneurs in the culinary industry by providing essential training to help launch and sustain their businesses.
Food Insecurity
No military family should feel hunger or be forced to ration food, yet 1 in 6 military families struggles with food insecurity. We’re combating this crisis through grocery handouts and by distributing gift cards.