A Veteran-Owned Tin Story: Why We're Giving Half of This Memorial Day Weekend to the Travis Mills Foundation

If you've landed here looking for a veteran-owned business to support this Memorial Day, welcome. We'll keep this honest: BELA has been family-owned and veteran-owned for 28 years, our founder is an Air Force veteran, and this weekend we're sending half of every Veteran Box sale to an organization treating the hidden wounds of war — at no cost to the veterans who need it.

The reason that tin exists is a small story about a trade in a chow line.

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From the Air Force to a Veteran-Owned Seafood Brand

Before BELA, our founder Josh Scherz was an Airman in the U.S. Air Force. Like every airman, soldier, sailor, and Marine before and after him, his meals came in a brown plastic pouch labeled M.R.E. — Meals Ready to Eat.

Every MRE has its currency. Coffee. Hot sauce. The pound cake. And in the rotation, sardines in tomato sauce.

Josh hated the candy bars. He loved the sardines. So he traded.

He'd swap his Skittles, his M&Ms, his Charms — bartering with anyone in line who'd rather have sugar than fish — and stack up tins of sardines in tomato. That little tin became one of the small, real comforts of military life. Twenty grams of protein, a hit of acidity and salt, something that tasted like food instead of fuel. Something that almost tasted like home.

When he founded BELA in 1997 with his mother Florence, that memory was the seed. Today, every tin of BELA — sardines, mackerel, and codfish — is hand-packed in the same family cannery in Olhão, Portugal we've worked with from day one. You can read the full BELA story here.

A Long History in a Small Tin

Tinned fish has been feeding militaries almost as long as the tin can has existed. Napoleon's army popularized the format in the early 1800s. Sardines were standard issue in WWI and WWII field rations on both sides of the Atlantic. When the modern MRE replaced K-rations and C-rations in the 1980s, the menu changed — but fish stayed in the rotation.

There's a reason. A tin of sardines is shelf-stable for years, opens with a pull-tab, requires zero prep, and delivers more protein, omega-3s, and calcium than almost anything else its size. It's the original ready-to-eat meal. Long before "pantry hero" became a food trend, it was a soldier's lunch.

The Veteran Box: A Limited-Edition Tribute

The BELA Veteran Box is a limited-edition three-pack of our Sardines in Tomato Sauce — the same MRE flavor that got Josh through deployment. Hand-packed in Portugal. Bright, classic tomato. Real fillets. Nothing extra.

Year-round, 36% of every Veteran Box sale is split across three veteran-supporting organizations: the Travis Mills Foundation, The Headstrong Project, and Heroic Hearts Project.

This Memorial Day weekend, we're doing something different.

50% to The Headstrong Project, May 23–26

From Friday, May 23 through Monday, May 26, 50% of every Veteran Box sold goes directly to The Headstrong Project.

If you don't know The Headstrong Project: it was founded in 2012 by Zach Iscol, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq. He started it after he came home and watched the casualty count keep climbing — not from enemy action, but from suicide. Friends. Fellow Marines. People who had survived deployment and then weren't surviving the return.

The Headstrong Project provides confidential, stigma-free, cost-free mental health care to veterans, service members, and their families — across every service era and every discharge status. There's no insurance fight, no waitlist purgatory, no paperwork wall. Clients are matched with a trauma-trained therapist and receive up to 30 sessions of evidence-based PTSD treatment, delivered in-person where the network reaches and via telehealth everywhere else. Care is built in partnership with Weill Cornell Medicine and a national network of clinicians who specialize in combat trauma.

Their mission, in three words: Triumph Over Trauma.

Every dollar matters.

Why Support Veteran-Owned Businesses This Memorial Day

There are a lot of ways to recognize Memorial Day. Flags, parades, a moment of silence at noon. All of them count.

But if you're going to spend money this weekend anyway, sending some of it through a veteran-owned business that's actively routing proceeds to veteran families compounds the gesture. You get dinner. They get treatment. An organization that's already doing the work gets more fuel.

BELA is one option among many. We're not the only veteran-owned food brand worth your wallet this weekend, and we'd encourage you to find more. But if a tin of sardines in tomato — the same one Josh traded his candy for — sounds like something you'd actually eat this weekend, it's a clean way to make the gesture mean something.