3.3 KiB
3.3 KiB
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| Mutual benefit model for restaurants and communities |
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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?