Problems

• Small business restaurants
  • are shuttering en masse as their dining rooms become uninhabitable due to the possibility of virus transmission,
  • causing thousands of people to lose their source of income and ability to sustain themselves and their families.
• Households:
  • are now where people are having to work their jobs, provide homeschooling and childcare, prepare food, and find a sense of normalcy amongst panic.
  • In order to suppress the rate of infection, people should be staying within those households as much as possible, ideally only leaving to replenish necessary supplies.
  • As available spaces for households to get their supplies (ie grocery stores) grows increasingly limited, those spaces become increased vectors of virus transmission.
  • The current shelter-in-place reality may be our norm for the next 12-18 months.

Collaboration

• How might small business restaurants serve the needs of their communities and simultaneously maintain their businesses and workers?
• Can we alleviate the dependency on grocery stores and decrease peoples’ need to leave their homes and potentially spread the virus?
• Can we provide relief to households who are having to juggle too many tasks while living through a fearful situation?
• Can we help workers who need income and support?

Could a small business restaurant embedded within a community could provide all meals for [X] amount of households per week at an average of $[X]?

Restaurants might develop a new model for this time by providing a full meal plan for households to pay a fixed weekly cost to have all their food needs covered. Households could pick up their food in a touchless system, quickly and efficiently in staggered times.

A neighborhood focused model could be adapted and used in a multiplicity of contexts to incisively develop sustained communities that might push back against the spread of the virus.

Benefits

• Small business restaurants
  • A subscription service could provide more consistent and forecastable income.
  • Cooking larger serving sizes of food would allow more exact product orders and less food waste.
  • Less dependence on single serving packaging would lower costs and waste.
  • An opportunity to organize larger scale support for business.
• Households
  • Less time spent worrying about buying food and preparing meals for the week.
  • Complete meals would ideally mean better nutrition to weather illness.
  • Less time spent in potentially dangerous shared spaces.
  • Reduce kitchen injuries and food handling issues to keep people out of hospitals.
  • Increased access to safely handled food with a reduction in the amount of touches on food products.
  • By organizing as a community to support a small business restaurant, individual costs go down when compared to ordering takeaway food on a per-meal basis.

Considerations

• Could multiple restaurants work together to share workload and provide variety for their communities?
• Could the week’s provisions be a combination of prepared food and essential grocery items?
• How might this system meet a multiplicity of dietary needs and restrictions?
• What is the physical and technological infrastructure needed to facilitate this system?