After six weeks of competing for a $50,000 prize in the Food Network contest series The Great Food Truck Race, the Martha’s Vineyard team came home without the cash but with their heads held high.

“Our grand prize was being able to show the triumphs of winning and the triumphs of us losing and staying positive. We won 150 per cent, without a doubt,” Jenny DeVivo said the morning after Thursday’s season finale, which saw her Team Lunch Ladies edged out in the finals by their arch-competitors, Mystikka Masala of Dallas, Tex.

Ms. DeVivo, the West Tisbury school chef, and her assistant Nisa Webster recruited Ms. Webster’s brother, Eli Carroll, to take part in the barnstorming series that sent them into the streets of six Western cities to sell their menu of wrap sandwiches, salads, falafel and fries.

Lunch Lady Eli Carroll currently lives in North Carolina but has been cooking his whole life with sister Nisa Webster.

Courtesy Eli Carroll

Lunch Lady Eli Carroll currently lives in North Carolina but has been cooking his whole life with sister Nisa Webster.

Courtesy Eli Carroll

“Not only have Nisa and Eli cooked together since they were small children, but we all worked together in the early ’90s, catering,” Ms. DeVivo said. “It’s organically special that we all are together for this great adventure.”

To win the contest, which was filmed last summer, food truck teams had to outsell their competition while trying to prevail in a series of challenges set by program host Tyler Florence, a celebrity chef and restaurateur.

In Santa Barbara, teams had to assemble an elegant salad while riding in a rotating aerial tram car to a mountaintop restaurant. In San Diego, they were presented with an octopus to work into menus. At a Las Vegas casino, the spin of a roulette wheel determined each team’s main-dish protein.

With the slogan “Thinking outside the lunchbox,” Team Lunch Ladies weathered all of the challenges, earned praise from Mr. Florence and often finished each week with the most sales.

In the finals they faced Mystikka Masala, who dominated the challenges as the two teams battled it out in Los Angeles. The Texas contestants specialized in Indian-influenced Tex-Mex cuisine and included among their three members a drag queen who helped lure passersby to the truck.

Ms. DeVivo worked the streets as well, even stopping cars to tell drivers about the Lunch Ladies menu, taking their orders and delivering them to the vehicles.

“We might be the first drive-through food truck,” Ms. Webster said, as she handed an order through the rolled-down window of a sedan near the end of the final episode.

At elimination time, only $259 in sales separated the two finalists. As Mystikka Masala celebrated, the Lunch Ladies joined in, hugging and cheering their winning rivals.

“Winning is not necessarily the end game,” Ms. DeVivo said Friday. Being on the show has enabled her team to bring their message, that healthy food can be tasty, fun and affordable, to a nationwide audience, she said.

“We connected with more people than we could possibly have imagined.”

The six-week experience itself was also a pleasure, she said.

“We stayed in lovely, wonderful, swanky hotels; we were looked after so well,” she said. “The backstage angle of the whole production was mesmerizingly efficient and kind. It was a seamless enterprise.”

Team Lunch Ladies and their message haven’t seen the last of the cameras, Ms. DeVivo said. School food programs and media outlets have been showering them with requests and offers, and she said her first booking is a live online cooking class today at 4 p.m. on the Facebook page of Boston television station NBC10.

“Then I have another show next week, something similar for CBS,” she said.

Ms. DeVivo also has been profiled in a 12-minute video by equipment maker Waring Pro, which can be viewed on YouTube, and Ms. DeVivo has a video “sizzle reel” posted on her website, jennydevivo.com. Team Lunch Ladies also has a website, lunch-ladies.com.

And she hinted at more.

“Another situation is in the works to continue spreading the word that all kids deserve real food and meal times matter,” Ms. DeVivo said.