#13 Brandi Covington and Poonam Kumar- Feeding the frontline workers

Food can transcend boundaries. It can unite people irrespective of their background. And it can bring healing and nourishment to both who serve and who are served. This is the story of Brandi Covington - cofounder of Cooking With Corey and Poonam VK - cofounder and CEO of Saavor, who joined hands to serve meals to healthcare workers during the pandemic in NYC.

In this episode, Brandi Covington - cofounder of Cooking with Corey - shares her struggles as an entrepreneur and small business owner in NYC during the lockdown that forced many businesses to shut down. Brandi talks about what motivates her and how she managed to keep her business afloat while serving health care workers at the same time.

I also talk to Poonam Kumar, cofounder and CEO of Saavor - a marketplace and mobile application platform connecting local chefs and food companies to their community - who started a fundraiser during the lockdown to support meals for healthcare workers. She and Brandi partnered to serve and deliver to many hospitals around the city.

Brandi operates out of The Entrepreneur Space, which is a food and business  incubator in Long Island City, NY. They provide a home to emerging businesses at a reasonable cost. During Covid-19 they have worked on keeping the foodpreneurs up and running by working with the Queens Borough President's Office to Fuel the Frontlines, feeding the hospital workers in the hardest hit areas, such as Queens, New York. The total number of meals the foodpreneurs served frontline workers thus far is 1,625.

To learn more about Brandi's business:
info@cookingwithcorey.com
Instagram: cooking_with_corey
Website: cookingwithcorey.com

To learn more about Saavor:
Instagram : saavornow
Website : http://www.saavor.co/

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Welcome brandy to our show heroes of New York.

Unknown Speaker  0:03  
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Unknown Speaker  0:05  
Brandy. I've heard about you from the Queens borough president's office. And I know you work with them that you do your business through their office, right. And you have your own venture called cooking with Cory, you've been catering, but the COVID has hit you badly. And I mean, all small businesses have been affected. What got you into catering and cooking?

Unknown Speaker  0:25  
So originally, I started out working with after school programs, I have a passion for working with children. I moved over into the deal. We the deal is kind of a different template than after school, so I decided to do something else. I was making cupcakes on the side. And I ran into an email from nyjah, which is New York City Housing Authority, where they were offering a program to help people kickstart catering businesses. And when was this? This was about three years ago actually. So I joined that originally started out making cupcakes Once I graduated and I started to look for jobs in the food industry, I found that more people wanted food like full menus rather than just desserts. And so from there cooking McCoy blossomed. We reached out to a couple of people trying to find work. Eventually we got a contract with a performing arts school in Manhattan, and we started making meals for that school breakfast, dinner and lunch about 3000 meals a week for the school. And then we grew as far as getting outside work for catering. We were doing very well before Kobe hit

Unknown Speaker  1:36  
your business is called cooking with Cory, Cory.

Unknown Speaker  1:39  
Cory is actually my fiance. Actually our wedding was canceled due to COVID two Oh, no. I'm sorry, may 30. We would have been officially married but he still remains my fiance for the moment. And he is actually the head cook and he was already a professional chef when we met and so So I just brought him along on the adventure and we got cooking report from that.

Unknown Speaker  2:04  
Wow, that's beautiful. May 30. Is my wedding anniversary. Oh, what?

Unknown Speaker  2:10  
A lovely day to get married. Yes, yeah. Yes. I'm sorry to hear that you had to put off your wedding, but maybe it's for the best. Right? Well, all the things that people are going through and things that people are losing out on the fact that I can postpone, to me is still a blessing. There's a lot of things happening to people that they can't postpone. They won't have a second chance. So I'm taking it all in stride.

Unknown Speaker  2:35  
Yes, and I heard you're also a pathways winner. Can you elaborate more on that?

Unknown Speaker  2:40  
So the program I was telling you about that I joined with NYCHA which is the Pathways program where they help you jump start a business if you work with food. So one of the incentives for the program is if you go to all the classes and you make your business plan and you fulfill everything that they asked them you they will also give you free time in the kitchen, which is they paid for it for about up to two months and you make as much business as you possibly can. And then you use that free time in the kitchen to prepare for your events. And it just so happened that we got the contract with the school right out of the Pathways program. So the free time that I want to the program, I actually used to prepare the meals for the school. So that was a great kickstart for us because we were able to take in the money that we were receiving and build our team up to about 25 staff. We have delivery people, we have cashiers that were over at the school. So it was just a wonderful benefit being part of the pathway as well.

Unknown Speaker  3:40  
Mm hmm. So how has COVID impacted your business?

Unknown Speaker  3:44  
Originally, we had about 28 to 30 days with the work on our calendars. And now we're going in maybe two to three times a month to work because we have so many things. We have the school and then we have the private It people, then we have some work with the Department of Education. So there's so many things on our calendar because we're working in so many different ways. You know, I can't name each one. But I know that when I looked at my calendar before it was a full month when I look at it now, there's about two or three things written on it every month. So we have lost more than half of the work that we were receiving before COVID.

Unknown Speaker  4:25  
And you have had to let go of your staff.

Unknown Speaker  4:28  
Yes, we've had to let go of our staff, anything that we do now we have to limit it to myself and Cory, to cook the meals and also deliver the meals and depending on if the order is a decent size, we can get one or two more of our staff, but all the people who were going to the school and performing cashier work and going out to some of the gigs to serve the food for the events that we have that required people on site to serve the food. We're not getting any of that. So we're not having any of our workers for that either. So we have we've gone down from 25 to about four that are still in rotation.

Unknown Speaker  5:05  
I see. So how are you keeping yourself afloat now?

Unknown Speaker  5:09  
So we have been working with the Queens borough president's office. So that's one of the ways they have been receiving money to help small businesses. And with that money, they give it to the small businesses, we prepare meals, and then we deliver them to the hospital. So it's kind of like a one hand washes the other type of thing. And then also, we've been working with private fundraisers, people who are just taking on the challenge and want to do something and they're out there raising funds, and then they're reaching out to businesses like ours, to prepare meals and serve it to the hospitals as well.

Unknown Speaker  5:45  
Mm hmm. That's interesting, because this podcast is all about people who are rising to the challenge of helping others during the crisis,

Unknown Speaker  5:52  
and so many people are, yes, we're just grateful enough that the time that we were working that people were The work that we do, and they're looking to access to step in and help them with that mission. They're also helping us which is wonderful.

Unknown Speaker  6:09  
So you mentioned the Queensboro office, can you tell us a little bit more about the work that you do with them, like the kind of clients you're serving.

Unknown Speaker  6:17  
So these are hospitals in Queens. And so they're their nurses, the doctors, the anesthesiologists, we've gone to many of the departments in different hospitals to serve the meal. So they're individually prepared and hills, and they're going out by the hundreds each time we get order to these people eat because they're working around the clock and they're not having time to stop for lunch, or they don't have time to run out and to try to find something to eat. And so we've been providing those meals on a healthy status. How many hospitals have you served to now? Up till now I'd say at least speak something least 20 hospitals. Mm hmm. And about over 2500 meals. Wow.

Unknown Speaker  7:02  
Okay, so you've been serving meals to hospitals and health care workers, but you're also only working two to three days a month.

Unknown Speaker  7:10  
Why queens borough president's office and the private fundraisers right now are the only work that we really see we have a lot of our private customers that order food offline. We had a few of those customers, but they have faded out since you know, people are running out of money. Mm hmm. People may have a nest egg and they may feel a little bit comfortable spending money because they think that it'll pass soon. But now this is going on for months. So even those people can't afford to continue to do that. Yes, you are also in a supply chain. You're buying your raw materials from suppliers will see this How is this impacting them? Do you get to hear their side of the story? So we don't get to hear it but we get to see it because shopping is so much different. Now. Some things that we knew we can get on a regular basis, we can promise on our menu or on a weekly basis are now things that you can't find anymore. A lot of the vegetables, a lot of bread, eggs and things like that a lot of that stuff is not on the shelves any longer. And so that impacts what we can actually make an offer to people as well.

Unknown Speaker  8:15  
Mm hmm. I hear that flower is almost hard to find in stores these days. Indeed, it is.

Unknown Speaker  8:22  
Very true. It is hard to find flour, all those basic essentials like milk, bread, eggs, flour, all the things that are kind of like always in your pantry that we're seeing that we're having a hard time finding.

Unknown Speaker  8:37  
Right? So you said you also work with a private contractor. Can you tell us a little bit more about the work you do with them?

Unknown Speaker  8:44  
So Poonam is a business woman who started and kind of like Uber Eats, but for personal chefs. So you know, Uber Eats is kind of geared towards brick and mortars, where we share a commercial kitchen so you can Going saver, which is pronounced app, and you can order meals directly from the chefs and we still make those meals in our commercial kitchens. And then we get them out to the people who order them. So that's how I met. panache she acts the kitchen, if anyone in the kitchen would be interested in working with her on something like that I was one of the people that signed up. And me and Phnom have been working closely since then. And then when COVID hit, she went into action to try to raise funds to get food out to the hospitals. And being that we already had that relationship. We were one of those people that she called on when she raised funds to supply hospitals.

Unknown Speaker  9:40  
Interesting. So how many hospitals have you reached out through Poonam,

Unknown Speaker  9:45  
so of the 25? I would say about half of them have come from working with non

Unknown Speaker  9:51  
nice, also, are you doing anything on the side now that you have more time on your hands?

Unknown Speaker  9:56  
Yeah, so we on our end Instagram, we've been offering free cooking classes who follow us on Mondays, we give a list of ingredients to get on Wednesday. And then on Monday, we go live on the Instagram and we cook along with those people who want to cook with us. We're finding that a lot of people are home and they're not ordering out because they can't afford it. Some people are just scared to go outside of their homes, they don't want to leave home. So for these people who have been working hard, they're not used to being in the kitchen. So they don't really know how to cook and they don't really know how to make simple healthy meals. And so we tried to provide that to those people. Interesting.

Unknown Speaker  10:37  
Yeah. I had a question for you. It's definitely not easy to keep a business going in this crisis. And you're doing that. What drives you? What keeps you going every morning.

Unknown Speaker  10:51  
One of the things that me and Cory love about food is that it's a universal way to bring people together. And so if you check out Instagram, we have an actual show called cooking record. And it's geared to inviting people into our kitchen and sharing recipes with them or them sharing recipes with us. At the end of the episodes, we sit, we eat together, we talk about life, we talk about what's going on, there's just something about food and people that is gonna always be a glue, even during a pandemic, you know, food is at the top of the mess of something that people need and want to still enjoy. And so it's just that idea of bringing food and people together, and fun and exciting ways. And that's why we love it so much. And that's why we want to continue to share with the people, even if they can't pay at the moment, you know, just trying to give back and do what we can in this time of crisis.

Unknown Speaker  11:46  
Absolutely. It's all about what we can give back at this time.

Unknown Speaker  11:50  
And that doesn't cost us tons of money and we buy the groceries that we're going to make the food with and then you know the people watch, they don't have to pay anything. So you know Whatever you can you just have to be creative on money to give back to people during a time like this and we know food and that's the way we choose to give back.

Unknown Speaker  12:10  
Mm hmm. How can our listeners reach out to you in case they want to order from you?

Unknown Speaker  12:15  
Our website is www cooking. co Okay, I mg with wi th Cory Co Op, that calm cooking record calm, and they can check us out on Instagram, cooking underscore with underscore Cory and we also have Facebook and it's cooking with Cory and why.

Unknown Speaker  12:35  
Hmm, what's your hope for the future brandy

Unknown Speaker  12:38  
to get back to work to be able to bring back everyone that all of our staff because we have a lot of young people working with us and they were going to college This was helping them put money in their own pockets not having to depend on mom and dad. So we just miss out crew. We miss making food we miss being creative with food we miss feeding people. So My hope is just really for everyone to get back to work and being able to come together again and enjoy a good meal.

Unknown Speaker  13:07  
Wow, I truly hope that day is near. When we overcome this and get to do all that you just mentioned, that's beautiful. sharing food is one of the easiest and fastest way to spread love and build a community, you can transcend boundaries and cultures. And that's the best part, the cultural part of it.

Unknown Speaker  13:24  
No matter where you go, no matter what country you go to, no matter what group of people you visit, one thing that you will find is that at some point in some way, they come together to sit down to share a meal. And that's universal, and then it doesn't know any shade of color or creed or sex or anything like that. So that's the wonderful thing about and that's why we love it so much.

Unknown Speaker  13:47  
Absolutely. I hope our listeners enjoyed listening to our episode. Thank you so much brandy, and I wish you the very best in business in life.

Unknown Speaker  13:55  
Thank you so much. I'm so happy for you to have us.

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Hi Poonam, welcome to the show.

Unknown Speaker  0:03  
Hi, now, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. How are you doing?

Unknown Speaker  0:07  
I'm doing good. How are you doing? I'm it's this chaos. Oh, actually doing really well. Thank you. A lot of people are affected and I know you're doing a great job helping healthcare workers. This is June we are in mid June looking back over the past 10 to 12 weeks. How do you feel? What was your experience like?

Unknown Speaker  0:27  
Oh my god. It was like, you know, a different kind of experience I've never expected it's like a black swan kind of an event in the market. We never expected the market to suddenly take a plunge. And people losing so many jobs and lucky no such unemployment rate racing up. That's a complete mayhem here in New York and New Jersey. I'm sure you must have witnessed it as well. So it's pretty disheartening to see the entire city that's hustling and bustling to be completely dead for a good two to three months. So yeah, it was a sad scenario. We're here.

Unknown Speaker  0:58  
Mm hmm. He has been doing a lot of fundraising. Tell us more about it.

Unknown Speaker  1:04  
So we started raising funds from mid of April, we had a target of $10,000. We saw that a lot of people were hesitant to buy food from our local vendors. So basically what saver does is connect local companies, local food companies and independent chefs to customers. And we saw a lot of our own vendors, small businesses struggle, and we wanted to come up with a way where and we can also support the local business as well as help the frontline workers. We started a GoFundMe page, we were able to raise like around $10,350 and we were able to donate meals 2000 to 50 frontline workers in New York City in New Jersey.

Unknown Speaker  1:48  
Wow, that's great. What prompted you to do this,

Unknown Speaker  1:51  
just looking at the stories of all the doctors and the nurses, the struggles of the small businesses, my co founder, Dr. Sunita tota who also happens to be my aunt. She was saying if we could help these people, it would be great through our business. So that is how we started this one page.

Unknown Speaker  2:10  
And how many local food vendors have you been able to help through this fundraising?

Unknown Speaker  2:14  
Not many, because our target was not too much because Sabre is still a startup company, not many people know about it. We just partnered up with 15 to 20 local vendors for this project, and we don't we just help them.

Unknown Speaker  2:28  
Mm hmm. So I have spoken with Brandi from cooking with Corey, and she was the person who shared your information. So you know, so this year he has a food vendor who's already out there working, keeping her business afloat, and also helping healthcare workers at the same time.

Unknown Speaker  2:44  
Oh, yeah, she's amazing company was able to provide us a very low priced meal boxes, which helped us reach out to a lot of frontline workers as well. I mean, the mailboxes that they usually sell for $9 50 cents and $10 50 cents. They was selling it to us for $7 50 cents and $7. So that's a great price difference and which allowed us to reach a lot of frontline workers as well.

Unknown Speaker  3:08  
Mm hmm. That's very interesting. So if you could just draw a picture of how this operation works, when you've raised the funds, how do you then distribute it to these food vendors? In what proportional? How do you decide who gets to do what how do you decide the catering and things like that?

Unknown Speaker  3:23  
Yeah, I mean, we already had spoken to all of vendors, the 15 to like good 18 vendors that we had in our company. We spoke to them and we told them that this is what we are trying to do. Would you be able to reduce the price and everyone were like, you know, even though their business were not generating enough revenue, they came forward and they said, like, you know, some of them were even providing us with $5 25 cents of mailboxes, and we partnered up with them. When it comes to reaching out to hospitals like you know, we partnered up with quite a few hospitals like Mount Sinai, Morningside, Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, Jamaica hospital, and we also partnered up with one of the nonprofit organizers That support mentally and physically challenged individuals. That's called HRC. It's in Shoreham, New York. So we were able to also support the caretakers over there who were taking care of the COVID-19 patients. Yeah, we did a lot of networking. It was a lot of like, you know, reaching out and time spent in networking and phone calls. And then we had to decide which hospitals to like, you know, focus and send the mailboxes to it was a one of the difficult decisions to make, because we were getting numerous emails for us to help them deciding whom to help and whom to leave out was one of the difficult decisions we had to make.

Unknown Speaker  4:38  
Yeah, I'm sure that's very hard to make. But how did you reach out to all these hospitals is one to raise funds, it's another to actually reach out to hospitals and say, we want to help you and serve you and then get approvals and so on and so forth to actually start serving. I just

Unknown Speaker  4:52  
directly reached out to a couple of hospitals and we also partnered up with one of the hospitals like you know, parent hospitals, and the word spread and oh, We started picking up providing meals to we started with Mount Sinai. And they were sweet enough to also taggers. And in social media to let other doctors know as well that this is what saver is doing. If you want to like, you know, get Indian meal boxes or American mailboxes, you can directly contact them. And so we started getting like 20 to 30 emails every day. Very interesting.

Unknown Speaker  5:21  
So you've been working very closely with these small business owners, what were the challenges that they were facing during this time,

Unknown Speaker  5:27  
during this time, the challenges that they were facing as a to decide as to what to provide in that price point, be the delivery because a lot of people were scared to even go to these hospitals, you know, for the exposure that they may get. So we used to end up doing deliveries, most of it ourselves. Some of the vendors, they did it, they also did the deliveries, but we had to step in and take care of that. So yeah, I mean, deciding and all the stores, some of the stores were closed, they were not getting it at the wholesale price that they usually do. So that was some of The challenges that they were facing and the you know, the chef's, they could not afford to pay the entire team, they had to cut short the employees as well. So a lot of difficulties, they were not getting enough revenues in the business. And besides that they were helping less to have such stronger vendors in our team.

Unknown Speaker  6:18  
Absolutely. Now that the city is opening up slowly we are in phase one, what are your plans and targets?

Unknown Speaker  6:25  
Well, to reach out to these hospitals, again, to see if you know, we can help them more to form some sort of business partnerships with them so that our local vendors can get direct access to these hospitals that we have formed relationships with over the past two, three months, that people would still be hesitant and scared to buy from local vendors. I think that's not going to change for the next few months to slowly start like you know, advertising and marketing and making sure that they understand that we are giving 100% margins to hygiene and sanitation when it comes to preparing the food and you bring On the message and helping as many people as we can along the way. That's wonderful. Do you also plan to fundraise further? Yes, I was thinking of doing it again. Maybe after a few days, I would just reach out to a few investors and see if they can price match whatever funds we have raised, so that we can help another thousand to 50 frontline workers?

Unknown Speaker  7:20  
Absolutely. Also, can our listeners reach out to your platform for their own if they want to order food?

Unknown Speaker  7:26  
Sure, our application is available both on iOS and Android. It's called saver as a VR and if they want to take a look at what we are doing, they can look us up at our Instagram page, which is safer now. As a VAR n o w. And do you operate in all parts of the city? No, we are in Central New Jersey and in Manhattan at the moment.

Unknown Speaker  7:46  
Okay, got it. This was great. Thank you so much for sharing your story and how you're helping frontline workers and small business owners. This is really important, so actually helping to sustain or kind of help the economy. Enemy keep going as well as healthcare workers. That's amazing. Thank you so much, Poonam,

Unknown Speaker  8:04  
it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me wish

Unknown Speaker  8:07  
you all the best. Thank you and your future endeavors and hope to hear about your company a lot more.

Unknown Speaker  8:13  
Thank you so much. I know take care. Be safe. Thank you.