Before the coronavirus struck, a Los Angeles-based healthy fast-food chain called Everytable had just received grant funding to roll out its social equity franchise program. During the pandemic, it pivoted from a retail model built on storefronts and meal subscriptions toward a mobile emergency response team to tackle food insecurity. It quickly became a lifeline for city residents and isolated people in need.In fact, working with the City of Los Angeles Department of Aging, Santa Monica College, and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Everytable distributed more than 3 million emergency meals to homeless shelters, senior living centers, homebound elders, and hungry college students and families who didn’t always know where their next meal was coming from. We sat down with Sam Polk, the co-founder of Everytable, to discuss good eats, health care partnerships, and more.
Before the coronavirus struck, a Los Angeles-based healthy fast-food chain called Everytable had just received grant funding to roll out its social equity franchise program. During the pandemic, it pivoted from a retail model built on storefronts and meal subscriptions toward a mobile emergency response team to tackle food insecurity. It quickly became a lifeline for city residents and isolated people in need.In fact, working with the City of Los Angeles Department of Aging, Santa Monica College, and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Everytable distributed more than 3 million emergency meals to homeless shelters, senior living centers, homebound elders, and hungry college students and families who didn’t always know where their next meal was coming from. We sat down with Sam Polk, the co-founder of Everytable, to discuss good eats, health care partnerships, and more.
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Some of the foundations came from this perspective of, let's make sure it's a person from Compton sort of running the content store and let's keep all these social equity franchise stores in the, in the neighborhoods where they're really needed. And we said, no, no, no, no, no. These stores are needed everywhere.
And we want the content, you know, entrepreneur to run the content store, but then also to run the store in silver Lake. You know what I mean? In studio city and et cetera, because it's not just about access to healthy food is about economic empowerment.
Welcome to the health pilots podcast presented by the center for care innovations. This podcast is about strengthening the health and wellbeing of historically under-invested communities. Every episode offers new ideas and practical advice that you can apply today.
This episode is adapted from a recent webinar. Enjoy Sam Polk is the founder and CEO of every table, a social enterprise on a mission to transform the food system to make delicious and healthy food affordable and accessible to everyone everywhere. A former hedge fund trader Sam left a successful career on wall street to follow his heart, to fight food, injustice and inequality in America.
In 2013, he founded a nonprofit called feast originally called grocery ships to address food related health problems in South Los Angeles. By helping family food providers make healthy choices through nutrition, education, cooking classes, free produce and support groups. In 2015, Sam created every table which offers made from scratch meals priced.
According to what is affordable in a specific neighborhood to date, every table has sold more than 3 million fresh prepared meals throughout communities and on college campuses across the greater Los Angeles through a combination of grab and go markets, a home delivery service, and smart fridge vending machines.
With the backing of food forward investors like Kimbal Musk, Maria Shriver, Gwenyth Paltrow, Tom's social enterprise fund acumen, the WK Kellogg foundation Annenberg foundation, and the California wellness foundation. Every table has a potential to work in every major metropolitan area across the country.
And we are excited to welcome him to our meeting today. Well, first of all, thanks a lot for having us. We really appreciate it. And, you know, I think the thing, you know, there's a couple of things to talk about. Maybe that weren't mentioned, but so, you know, as it talked about, my history is, you know, wall street and then starting a nonprofit.
And so I was working in South LA with all of these moms on a daily basis. And basically came to understand that there was very real demand for fresh food. And so that's when it sort of, you know, it was almost like my sort of non-profit background and my wall street background started to intersect and I started to wonder.
Well, you know, why, if there's so much demand for healthy food, is there no supply and underserved neighborhoods? And there's actually a pretty, I mean, there's a million reasons, structural racism, poverty, you know, so many, but as far as the business models of food businesses go, there's actually sort of pretty clear reasons.
And they all have to do basically with underlying business models and perishability, and so what I mean is. You know, the largest food companies in the country are fast food companies and CPG companies like your makers of, you know, cereal and soda and chips. And the reason those companies are so big is because they've figured out how to sell foods so cheaply and the way they sell food cheaply is actually remarkably the same, which is that.
They basically use this structure of centralized production and national distribution. So, you know, one way to think about it is like the maker of corn pop cereal. We'll have a single factory where they're making all the boxes of corn pops in the world, huge economies of scale, huge efficiencies, automated robots, doing a lot of the work dramatically lowers the production costs of that box of corn pops.
And then once the box is done and comes out of the factory, they put it on trucks and send it all over the country. Where it sits on retailers, shelves, you know, shelf stable until somebody buys it. And you know, it's great for the bit the business who's making it. Cause they can do these huge runs from that central kitchen to keep costs low.
And it's great for the retailers who are selling it because they've got no waste risk with their box with cereal because. It's not going to go bad for six or nine months. Um, and so it's because of that sort of efficient system that they're able to keep prices so low. And the key behind that is that it's all about non-perishable goods.
And the same thing is actually true for fast food where, you know, you think about fast food as a restaurant, but it really. A fast food restaurant is the end of a national supply chain. That is basically just exactly the same thing, a supply chain that's based on, you know, shelf stable products made in a huge factory and then sent all over the country.
So think about, you know, McDonald's, you know, your bun is made one or two factories, you know, frozen beef patties, cheese. Pickles, frozen fries, just mass produced and then distributed. But of course, the reason that works is because there's no perishability and this is basically like a long answer to the question of like, why does a salad cost $15 and a, and a burger and fries costs $6.
And this is really the answer, because if you think about. You know, for example, how a sweet green works is ingredients, the fresh produce, and the meat will come into a city and then gets distributed to the restaurant level. And at the restaurant level is where they cook and process it and turn it into a salad.
And if you start thinking about a sweet green or really any fresh food restaurant as a food production facility, it's completely inefficient in terms of if Sweetgreen's going to have 20. You know, restaurants around the city, they're going to have 20 kitchens, 20 teams of people, 20 sets of equipment.
Their rent is going to be in the most high rent area. And all those reasons are why the costs creeps up and up and up. And so what every table did is we basically said, look, you know, we know that we need to hit this $6 price point in Compton for us to be competitive. And you know, we are basically busting this myth that there is no demand for healthy food in Compton.
But what there is, is demand for $6 meals, basically. And so the way we do that is we have the central kitchen where we're making everything from scratch and then packaging it in grabbing no containers so that when we open a store in Compton, instead of it costing like a million and a half dollars, like the standard restaurant, or, you know, requiring 10 people to run or requiring 2,500 square feet of space.
No, our restaurants cost $200,000 to build and, you know, 700 square feet of space and to be run with one or two people. And so that's how we make healthy food, more affordable for everybody. But we also believe, you know, as you know, that affordability means different things in different neighborhoods. So, you know, when we opened a store in Brentwood, it'll be seven, $8, great price, huge value to the folks in Brentwood.
But when we opened the store in South LA, it'll be five or six bucks, you know, even better value. And it's, you know, it's really about sort of like. You know, equality through equity, where it's like, it's not the same price for everybody. It's actually offsetting the structural imbalances that you know, many folks in these neighborhoods have started off facing.
And I think that's the last thing sort of all mentioned sort of in this group where there there's two things that sort of weren't mentioned that may be relevant here. One is that, you know, we raised money from Kellogg and Annenberg. We actually just found out we just got a million dollar grant from the Kroger foundation.
And all of that is going towards what we call our social equity franchise program. And so, you know, if you think about franchising, franchising is a great way for businesses to grow. Domino's is all franchise McDonald's all franchise. But the problem with franchising is like so many industries that perpetuate privilege.
You've got to have money. You gotta have capital basically to get into it. And so, you know, opportunity is not evenly distributed, but talent is. And so we find, you know, really incredible entrepreneurs from historically marginalized backgrounds. And when we find them and we, you know, they want to start throwing every table restaurant, we then have gone to these large foundations so that after we train these folks and they go through what we call every table university, Then we can lend them the money to build their own franchise.
So over the long run, you know, we think we're pushing against structural inequality, both through the pricing and locations of our restaurants, but also through economic ownership. So, you know, at the end of the day, if we do, you know, succeed in our very ambitious vision of really becoming the largest, fast food company in the country, it will be in partnership with tens of things.
That was of social equity entrepreneurs that own their own Everytable businesses. And then the last thing to mention is that, you know, we just closed this $16 million round of funding series B funding that was led by Kaiser Permanente ventures. And it was Kaiser's first real investment into fresh food.
And to we're really excited about that and sort of the healthcare world addressing social determinants of health. And then we're also going into this medically tailored meals business, where we can leverage our operational and logistical capacities to also meet the needs of patients who are suffering from, you know, a specific set of diagnoses.
And so that's sort of just beginning for us, but, you know, we're, we're really excited about that. So I'm going to pause there and see if there's any, Hey Sam, Francis, Charles. Great word. Really applaud what you're trying to do. A couple of questions. One is, uh, in your kitchens. With COVID and everything. Are you having difficulty going after, um, PPE and protective gear for your employees and things like that.
And then the second question from a healthcare perspective is, you know, did you hire dieticians and whatnot to make sure that the stuff you're delivering is, I mean, it's fresh, so obviously it's better than fast food, but can you talk about that process a little bit? Yeah. So a great question. So the PPE we've been successful getting it, but it's expensive.
So that's been a big problem, but we've, you know, we've had to figure out how to sort of restructure our kitchen to keep social distancing, et cetera. And you know, we've been successful at that. And then as far as the dieticians go, yes. Although, you know, one of the, I'll tell you a little bit about our strategy.
So yeah, we do have, you know, dieticians, especially working with us on the medically tailored meals. You know, menu, but also have consulted in general, but there there's sort of who believe. So we have one is exactly what you said, which is like, you know, for us, it's not about a certain sort of calorie range, as much as it is about being fresh and using whole food ingredients, et cetera.
But then we do also have these, you know, calorie and saturated fat and sodium guidelines that we follow. But one of the things that we've sort of been very focused on is actually not leading with that to the customers, because we wanted to make, you know, delicious, amazing food that anybody could eat.
That is not just for people on a diet, basically. Um, and I think we've done a good job of sort of like, you know, hewing and accomplishing both of those targets. Debbie Rosen from Northeast Valley health corporation. So this is amazing, amazing work. I'm wondering, have you, or maybe that's what we're going to talk about today?
What is the, what can be the relationship between our organizations, safety net providers who are in the communities, the low-income communities. And I really striving to, uh, to have some of this fresh food at a good price. We are currently doing food distribution. Um, we work with food forward and other organizations and we have a CalFresh grant, but this is taking it to a, you know, a higher level.
So I'd love to hear ideas about partnering. Yeah. Well, great. Thank you for asking. And I think, I mean, there's a few things that come to mind initially, you know, one, if there is a physical location that you have a hospital or a clinic, sort of with a certain amount of people we can build and every table store or location in that sort of facility.
So we're doing that a lot with Kaiser these days. So that's one thing. We also have this network of smart fridges, which is basically like healthy vending machines, so we can put. Smart fridges throughout those same facilities, so that not only your patients, but also your providers and staff can have access to fresh, healthy food at all times, literally where they're working.
We also have, and it's sort of showed in this video, this subscription delivery business, where, you know, we will drop a box of these fresh meals on your doorstep and the way the pricing works for that is the same. As a store is. So if you happen to be in a zip code of a neighborhood, that's, you know, below the average household income in the city, you'll get a $5 price point.
And if you're in a more affluent zip code, you'll get a seven or $8 price point. And so, you know, one would be sort of like marketing this to your potential patients. And we could find some, you know, relationship where we give a discount to those patients or something like that. And then the last thing that's interesting is the CalFresh thing where we're sort of working on that pretty hard to make sure that like right now, our restaurants can take the EBT cards for the restaurant meals program, but they can't accept full snap, but we're working to make that happen because, you know, the funny thing is like, I think our business model in some way, sort of like shows something that's wrong with the system where.
You know, you can't really get a salad made by us on snap. And our stores can't qualify yet a snack because they look too much like a restaurant, but all the center of a grocery store is prepared food. It's like, you know, corn pops didn't come out of the ground. Like corn pops. They were made somewhere into a thing.
Same with pop tarts, same with hot pockets. Same with it's just that they're shelf stable. And we've got all this federal regulation supporting processed and sort of unhealthy food, basically. Um, this is, uh, Elvis Salinas. I work here in Los Angeles and actually I've, I've been to winter stores here in downtown LA of about two blocks away.
And, um, I've never actually known the story behind every table. So I'm really appreciative obviously of the work that you do and. Know the mission. I guess my question is, you know, I have visited in every table and I want to ask about, you know, especially here in LA, you know, it is a predominantly Hispanic County.
So I wanted to ask about like variety. Cause I know that again, I had, it's been a while since I've been to one of the stores, but I wanted to ask about, you know, the. How do you put it the differences in terms of like food varieties, especially for, you know, different communities. I know South LA is predominantly Latino kind of communities.
I wanted to ask about just, you know, how do you appeal to people who understand McDonald's right. You know, what you're going to get, but I, I'm curious about, you know, different varieties of meals, making it, maybe culturally appealing. So I'm going to ask what your thoughts are about that. Yeah, it was a great question.
So we, you know, I would say a starting point for us was that we knew that we couldn't come into South LA sort of carrying sort of wheat, grass salad with lemon Bennett bread, basically. And so we've basically, um, you know, designed the menu and the literally the theme of our menu is celebrating the cultures and cuisines of Los Angeles.
And it's sort of premised on this idea. That, you know, in Brentwood, they have a certain idea of what healthy food looks like. Right. But the truth is that all cultures basically had cuisines that were basically healthy and basically delicious. And that's sort of how humans have evolved. It's only in the last 50 years that we've gone to this sort of like crazy madness of prepared or processed and junk food.
And so for example, some of our bestsellers of all time have been the Pueblo chicken Tinga, which has been on our menu since the very beginning. You know, we launched with posole, which has done really well. We've got, um, our best-selling dish of all time is actually something called trap kitchen, chicken Curry, and trap kitchen are these two content chefs who started this.
You know, soul food delivery business out of their grandmother's kitchen. And it got so popular that they both got 300,000 Instagram followers and then got shut down by the, by the County of Los Angeles, because it turns out you're not allowed to do that, but we partnered with them to make basically this like chicken Curry dish that is out of this world, super healthy, super delicious, super filling, and it's sort of beloved.
And we sort of like, you know, if you think about our challenge, it really is. Can we make. Food that works well in Brentwood and Inglewood. And the, the answer that we've come to is like, it's almost like the Inglewood customer is the more sort of discerning customer that we really have to please. And we trust that if we can make food, that folks in Inglewood will like that is super healthy.
You know, Brentwood folks will like that as well. I do want to circle back to, you know, this partnership, especially, you know, this is a room full of, um, safety net providers, California wide, and also Colorado. Why do you have any ideas for how you're looking to expand or ways that we can partner, you know, outside of Los Angeles, like any insights onto how we can start to maybe think about partnering?
Many of these same issues are, you know, in every community. And I think, um, Yeah, I think folks would like to hear that. Yeah. So we're, we're expanding in Southern California all over Southern California right now. So including orange County, Riverside, Santa Barbara, San Diego, et cetera. So that's all partnerships on the table there.
And then we're also expanding in New York city, um, starting in two to Q3 of next year. We're unfortunately not in sort of Colorado yet, although it's on the agenda. And then partnerships. Yeah. It's really like, you know, from medically tailored meals to just this idea of food as medicine. Like I do think that we're the only company out there right now making like truly delicious, you know, healthy, fresh food.
That, you know, when we, when we sort of, you know, between us, when we first contracted with the government in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we were selling them meals at $4 and 50 cents. And, you know, w we, weren't making a lot of margin as you might guess on that, but we made it work. And so, you know, our whole system is built around.
You know, efficiency and, you know, really fresh food at really low prices. So I do think it has massive, massive health impacts on, on folks and that partnerships, you know, we are open for business for partnerships. If anybody wants to talk to us kind of on a similar note. Um, so my name's Amelia, I am with Jefferson center for mental health in Colorado.
And. You obviously right now are operating mostly in like Metro areas, cities, high populations. Have you thought at all about when you kind of like take over and change the world, it becomes a big bottle of, you know, healthy food. Make that the thing, how this will. Look in rural places. And when I think about your distribution and how quick it needs to go, you know, even I'm sure as you can imagine, when it comes to healthcare and rural locations, there's trouble reaching people, getting to them, even for delivery.
And just curious, you know, as you've thought about the future and kind of reaching people that are harder to reach, what have you thought about, I think there's sort of like good news and bad news. Like the bad news is as you sort of intuited, it's like. Our model sings. The more dense an area is the good news is that it's not sort of a one size fits all model.
So for example, when we started, our central kitchen was 250 square feet somewhere. And so with a model like that, like you can make it work with. You know, three or four or five stores or so I do think that we will be everywhere, maybe not, you know, dull, most rural areas where that's just not going to work, but in increasingly rural areas, it's just going to take us longer to get there because we'll start with the most dense areas first.
Well, if you want a partner, when you think about the rural areas, then remaining, there's a question in the chat about collaborations with schools. And I also want to add on a question around, so you've spoken about food as medicine, which I'm a strong believer in, but food is also a place where people come together and feel comfort.
And it's also one of the first things the person would step out of the house for, for their children and when they are in need. So behavioral health now being a huge issue in this country and no way that the resources that the healthcare centers will, will be enough and also takes a lot for a person to go to a healthcare center to seek those services.
Any thoughts around your role around help finding people, helping people getting access to services when they may not be coming to clinics? Yeah. I mean, the, the only, you know, we've thought about that a lot as far as sort of food being a place of gathering. And so how we sort of started was these individual meals, which actually wasn't sort of particularly pre to predisposed to that.
You'll see us this year, start launching what we call sort of components, which is basically almost like family style meals. Like you can get, you know, four to six pieces of salmon or, you know, roast chicken and then sides of sweet potato mash. And. Green beans and whatever, so that you can actually basically create a family meal using that totally fresh with very limited cooking.
So I think that's one thing. And then the second thing is like, you know, our delivery model is really about sort of getting. That is, you know, candidly, why, why we sort of were such a good solution for the city of Los Angeles, because, you know, during coronavirus, you know, all the food relief infrastructure has been about how to get people to the food, whether it's a food bank or soup kitchens, et cetera.
And all of a sudden you had vulnerable populations where the elderly or whatever, who didn't want to leave their homes. And so it became okay, now, how can you get. The food to the people. And that's why every table, because we've structured it like this, where we control the production of food, the kitchen, and then also the refrigerator delivery vehicles.
We can go anywhere, you know, people need us. And it's also, you know, we, we did a partnership with anything like open society around the election, where we put information on voting and voting rights into the boxes as we were distributing them. So it's a good sort of conduit for marketing in some ways.
And he wants to talk about your social equity franchise program. It's fascinating to think about how you use this to actually build up the skills and a community and provide those sort of opportunities to run a business. Um, are you just really early in or have you learned anything that you could share?
Early in only that we got all these program-related investments from the foundations and we're rapidly building it out and then coronavirus hit. But now we've, we're launching our first one in Hollywood actually this month, basically. So, and then we've got, you know, plans and funding that looks like to build 30 next year and then another 30, the following year, all around Southern California.
And we'll start doing the same thing in New York city as well. And it really is for us about, you know, really about ownership. Like, you know, this, we are big fans of sort of a push to raise the minimum wage to $15 in at the same time, it doesn't really change the racial wealth gap, but if you've got an entrepreneur who's able to make a hundred, $200,000 a year with one of these stores and build it up and build it up and then maybe take on a second store in a third store, in a fifth store.
And then, and that's when you really start to change things, you know, as far as we're concerned, So follow up question on that. Will you put requirements that the entrepreneur has to come from that community? Or could it be that someone who is successful in Hollywood becomes your super franchisee and manage?
You know, it might surprise you. It's almost the opposite. And it's funny. It's like we, we had to win this huge battle with some of the foundations. And I would say that some of the foundations came from this perspective of. Let's make sure it's a person from Compton sort of running the content store and let's keep all these social equity franchise stores in the, in the neighborhood where they're really needed.
And we said, no, no, no, no. These stores are needed everywhere. And the Compton, you know, entrepreneur to run the content store, but then also to run the store in silver Lake, you know what I mean? And studio city and et cetera, because it's not just about access to healthy food is about economic empowerment.
And, and by the way, The other thing that may be counterintuitive to that is that, that doesn't actually mean that the stores in studio city and silver Lake make more money. And that's the thing that sort of blows people's minds is that the store is in South LA and Compton profitable, you know, and it just goes to speak to like there's so little competition in so much demand that, that works easily.
Well, thank you so much. Um, I hope everyone enjoyed this session today. Had a little bit of gratitude. We've got to hear about some great partners at every table. Any final thoughts from folks? I just wanted to say thank you very much for obviously CCI bringing sand in again, I, you know, I've only been in LA for four years, but just hearing about that story and I've, I've been to South LA and I can totally tell, uh, you know, it's definitely a huge need.
So I just want to say thank you to you, Sam, for your time. And obviously CCI staff for like letting us know what's going on in our community and how obviously we kind of. You know, it's, it's like, we're, we both share similar missions just in different, uh, you know, perspectives or how we approach it. So yeah.
Thank you to you all and said, you know, be able to bring this together. So I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.