Great Plates Delivered program launches this week with 30 restaurants in Sacramento

Zion Taddese in her Queen Sheba restaurant on Broadway. Queen Sheba will participate in Great Plates Delivered.

Sacramento (Wednesday, May 6) Mayor Darrell Steinberg Wednesday kicked off Sacramento’s version of “Great Plates Delivered,” the FEMA and State-funded food delivery program recently announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The city will receive 94 percent reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State of California over the next month pay up to 140 local restaurants to make three meals a day for up to 3,500 seniors and other vulnerable Sacramento residents.

Great Plates Delivered launches this week in Sacramento with 30 restaurants located throughout the city. Fifty-nine percent of the restaurants included in this initial phase are minority owned, 30 percent are owned by women, and 20 percent have African-American owners.

“When you’re offered an eight-to-one match to do something profound for your suffering businesses and residents, you must leap at the opportunity,” said Mayor Steinberg. “This program makes a direct connection between vulnerable restaurants that need our help and vulnerable people who need to eat.”

The City of Sacramento has committed $250,000 to funding Great Plates Delivered, which will leverage a program totaling $4 million. This will be enough to feed 3,500 seniors and get up to 140 restaurants back to work through the program’s current end date of June 10.

“I’m just so thankful and blessed to be able to do this,” said Zion Taddese, owner of Queen Sheba Ethiopian Cuisine on Broadway. “It’s such a good way of giving back to our community, giving back to our seniors.”

Each participating restaurant will prepare 50 meal kits per day containing breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some restaurants will make the meal kits three days a week, and some will participate four days a week. Owners will receive $60 per meal kit, meaning a restaurant participating three days a week will make $9,000, and one that makes food four days a week will earn $12,000.

An additional $6 in reimbursement received by the City will pay for uniform packaging that will be supplied to the restaurants and administrative costs including a mentoring program that will be led by Patrick Mulvaney of Mulvaney’s B&L and chef Brad Cecchi of Canon, both of whom have been leaders in the ongoing donation-funded Family Meal delivery program.

About 200 restaurants within the city limits have applied to participate in Great Plates Delivered. In order to be eligible, they must be able to produce 50 meal kits a day, be current on their business taxes, provide proof of insurance, register as a vendor with the city and have a current health certification from Sacramento County.

Julia Burrows, senior policy consultant in the mayor’s office, said the initial round of participants was carefully chosen to include at least two in each council district, with particular attention paid to including eateries in low-income Census tracts and diversity in food type and ownership.

“We’ve spent a lot of time, restaurant by restaurant, going through the list,” Burrows said. “We’ve also tried to focus on small, locally owned restaurants. Participating restaurants also  commit to sourcing as much produce and other products from our region as possible, generating income for farmers who’ve seen contracts cancelled as restaurants, schools and other consumers cancelled contracts.”

The food will be delivered by Paratransit vans, which have seen ridership dwindle as seniors and medically high-risk riders observe shelter in place orders during the Covid-19 shutdown.

The City is actively enrolling more residents who need food. Please call 311 to sign up. Seniors 65 and over qualify if they make no more than $74,900 for an individual and $100,000 for a couple and aren’t enrolled in other state and federally supported benefit programs. Those between 60 and 64 years old are eligible if they have an underlying medical condition that makes them at high risk for Covid-19. People 60 and older who have tested positive for Covid-19 or have been exposed and are quarantining as a result are also eligible.

While larger in scale, Great Plates Delivered builds on the success of food delivery efforts launched by the City and restaurant partners such as Mulvaney’s and Canon early in the pandemic. The City’s Justice for Neighbors fund in March allocated $174,000 to fund food deliveries to 725 low-income seniors with meals made by five restaurants. Last week, another $20,000 from Justice for Neighbors went to provide 6,000 meals to Sacramento State students for four weeks. That comes in addition to an earlier meal delivery service for 477 residents of five apartment complexes out of the Meadowview Community Center and a donation of $169,134 from the City-sponsored Donate4Sacramento fund that enabled the Sacramento Food Bank to provide groceries to 1,380  families in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

“We identified food insecurity as a key consequence of this pandemic right away,” Mayor Steinberg said. “We heard how the food banks were overwhelmed, how families were relying on their kids’ free and reduced lunches, and how many seniors could not get out to grocery stores. Sacramento stepped into the void in the very first week.”

Restaurants participating in first phase of Great Plates Delivered

A Taste Above, LLC

Andy Nguyen Vegetarian

Binchoyaki

Broderick House

Burgess Brothers DBA Avengers Hospitality

Caballo Blanco Restaurant

Camden Spit and Larder

Canon

Colo's Soul Food

de Vere’s Irish Pub

Device

Dos Coyotes Border Café – North Natomas

Falafel Corner

Fixins Soul Kitchen

Haveli Grill Inc.

Hawks Provisions + Public House

House Of Queen Sheba

Jimmy's Soul Food and Hmong Cuisine

Koshi Ramen Bar

Louisiana Heaven

Mulvaney’s B&L

Pho Ru Vietnamese Restaurant

Plates Cafe & Catering

Purple Pig Eats

Rossi Catering

Sacramento Catering Collective

Selland's Market Cafe

Viet Ha Noodles & Grill

Woodlake Tavern

The Great Plates Delivered is modeled on a pilot program that launched in Sacramento in March with five restaurants.