At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for food banks shot up all across the city while caterers found their source of income vanish overnight.
Hatchery Chicago, the East Garfield Park food business incubator, saw this happen firsthand. The entrepreneurs who used their kitchens tended to rely on catering to make money, and the food incubator scrambled to try to help them stay afloat.
That is when they hit upon an idea.
“We thought – if there was a way to invest the funds going into those meals into start-ups and local businesses, we can both help the businesses, but also help individuals facing food insecurity,” recalled Hatchery spokesperson Natalie Shmulik.
Thanks to the funding from Builders Initiative, a foundation that works to improve equity and supports environmentally sustainable food production, the Hatchery was able to pay the vendors to make meals, which were then distributed to local churches and other nonprofits that distributed free meals. As the pandemic subsided, they kept the Hatch Made Meals program going, teaming up with the Greater Chicago Food Depository to regularly distribute meals to the nearby Breakthrough Urban Ministries and Austin-based Broader Urban Involvement and Leadership Development. With food insecurity still very much an issue, the Hatchery aims to continue to keep the program going and expand the meal distribution footprint, potentially reaching out to farmers markets and other nonprofit partners that have the capacity to distribute meals on large scale.
Food Depository spokesperson Man-Yee Lee said they have been discussing the ways to collaborate with the Hatchery since 2020. Her organization saw the partnership as a natural fit. GCFD has been trying to make sure the meals get to the people that need them most. They also wanted to invest in “meal producers” – restaurants and caterers that were struggling to stay afloat.
GFPD traditionally supplied food to pantries throughout the Chicago area. In Austin alone, they currently supply food to 12 pantries and two soup kitchens, distributing about 384,000 pounds of food. But GCFD has also been trying to tackle the root causes of food insecurity in places like the West Side, such as poverty, systemic racism and disinvestment. Putting money in local entrepreneurs’ pockets was a step toward that goal.
“Hatchery supports local food and beverage entrepreneurs that are located with some of the areas most impacted by systemic disinvestment,” Lee said. “It perfectly aligns with our mission to end hunger. We feel it’s a perfect marriage of our skillsets.”
Today, Hatch Made Meals relies on a combination of funding from the Builders Initiative, GCFD and the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago, the organization that launched the Hatchery. Shmulik said that the depository covers the cost of the meals themselves and handles the delivery, while Builders Initiative covers the cost workforce training, coordination and outreach, and ICNC covers labor costs, program development and strategic planning.
Lee said the food depository chose Breakthrough and BUILD because they both work with “opportunity youth,” or young people ages 16 to 24 who are not in any kind of educational institution, training program and/or aren’t working. They also appreciated that BUILD worked with youth that are vulnerable to being recruited into gangs.
“That group of youth don’t [always] have access to food and to meals, and we’re talking about putting them on the right path in life,” Lee said. “They don’t need to be worrying about where their meals will come from.”
About a third of entrepreneurs based in the Hatchery are West Siders, but helping West Side entrepreneurs specifically has been one of Hatch Made Meals program’s goals. Shmulik said that they started out with six entrepreneurs. Under the current program, they can have as many as a dozen entrepreneurs in any given year, but entrepreneurs rotate throughout the year.
According to Dana Harding, a life-long West Sider who runs the Hatch Made Meal program, said that there are currently nine food businesses participating, and all of them are West Siders.
She said that the meals that get delivered vary depending on the demographics. Breakthrough’s free meals program serves children, while BUILD’s program serves adults.
Shmulik said that the initial funding allowed the entrepreneurs to make 200 to 500 meals a week. This not only helped them stay in business, but gave them the experience they needed to scale up.
“Since launching the program, we’ve been able to donate over 48,000 meals and we’ve been able to generate over $600,000 in revenue for local entrepreneurs,” Shmulik said. “On average, each entrepreneur has made anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 within the year of [taking part] in the program.”
Lee said that GCFD currently delivers around 300 meals a week to Breakthrough and between 400 and 500 meals a week to BUILD.
Trinisa Williams, of West Garfield Park, became a Hatchery member before the physical building was even finished. Her business, Trini’s Tasty Pastries, has been part of Hatch Made Meals for the past two years. Williams said that she was looking to do her part to address the shortage of access to fresh ingredients in the community.
“For me as a resident of Garfield Park and a business owner, I want my neighbors to have the same access I have to fresh, wholesome, and healthy food,” she said. “The additional income is good, but it is not the main reason we have been participating. We just want to be able to feed people.”
Williams said that there have been some hiccups on the “administrative side” of the program, and she wishes that the program delivered to more nonprofits. But she was happy that Hatch Made Meals requires meals to be nutritionally balanced, and that her meals have been well-received.
“It is a lot of work, between the meal planning, meal prep and production, and coordinating deliveries,” Williams said. “However, when we receive the feedback that the group loved the meals – it makes the hard work worthwhile.”
