Lots of people know about Chef José Andrés, via his restaurants and the nonprofit he founded, World Central Kitchen. He’s a philanthropic celebrity. The chance to cook a meal with him – on the front lines! – can motivate wealthy restaurateurs to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cause.
The nonprofit does loads of good work, and is a marketing powerhouse. One of its key tactics is to emphasize the number of meals it serves: Hundreds of thousands in a day! it will say. And it’s easier to sell a story when there’s a leader-hero at the center of it, a big, commanding, masculine hero.
Meanwhile, there’s a much quieter story that I know about, which is also about feeding people, feeding children, in fact. It’s about innovation, millions of meals, and a mostly female workforce. It has, unfortunately, so far, a sad ending.
Belinda Oakley
The quiet story starts when the pandemic hit across the United States in March 2020. The women at the center of the story is Belinda Oakley, the CEO of Chartwells, which is a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest companies, Compass Group. In 2018, Oakley, an Australian who had mostly worked in the retail sector, was tapped to lead the largest school lunch company in the country. It’s a fragmented market. There are 100,000 schools in the USDA’s school lunch program; Chartwells, where revenue mostly comes from local school contracts, serves 4,500 of them, or about 2 million meals a day.
Oakley is not an entrepreneur, per se – but during the pandemic, she and many others became what’s known as intrapreneurs – innovators inside companies. And together with a nonprofit entrepreneur from Texas, Jeremy Everett, she and the team at Chartwells came up with an innovative system to deliver shelf-stable school lunches in 5- and 10-day boxes through the postal system to rural children, literally from the islands of Hawaii, to the rural areas of Alaska, to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Jeremy Everett, executive director of the Baylor University Collective on Hunger and Poverty
Lunch Ladies Kept Working
“You’ve got to have government agencies, working with faith organizations, working with corporations, working with nonprofits,” said Everett, executive director at Baylor University Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, which operates field offices around Texas and looks for scalable solutions to hunger.
As the pandemic hit, the people who understood the importance of school lunches were the people on the (front) serving lines. Some 88% of Chartwells’ 16,000-member workforce are women. Oakley started hearing from them within days, as the schools shut down. “They were the first people to say – who’s feeding the kids? Who’s going to feed the babies?”
School lunches are quietly a critical source of nutrition for the 30 million kids who take part in the country’s school lunch program. It’s the most nutritious meal many of them will eat a day, and sometimes the only meal, for at least a million who are experiencing hunger, according to Feeding America.
Like a lot of organizations, Chartwells had to turn on a dime. The USDA, which runs the school lunch program, issued waivers so companies and systems could transform themselves to deliver outside a school setting. But some school systems had stopped paying. There was turmoil in the sales numbers, and more.
“This was a moment in time, when no one really knew how this was transmitted. We have a predominately older workforce,” Oakley said. “For me as a leader what was so difficult. I knew the people who were doing this were people in my charge.
“But I just looked at our teams, and I knew they can’t abandon these kids.”
Within a week, the company had gone from serving in 4,500 schools to serving in 2,000 pickup points, from schools to rec centers to churches. Buses became food delivery vehicles, with every seat filled with pallets. Regional managers within the company were piecing systems together on the fly.
Oakley adapted the company’s management systems. Mostly, she had to turn over decision-making to local teams. In town halls, the teams shared their experiences. She wrote a note every day, sending it companywide, sharing stories, thank you notes and ideas. “I wanted people to know someone saw how hard they were working.”
For example, she shared a note she got from the student council president in Dallastown, Pa. Dylan J. Rexroth wrote:
I had to drop something off today for the guidance office. While walking inside to the drop box, I saw lunch workers providing bagged meals for families in cars. While they waited for their meal, I saw the workers and the families talking, laughing, just being normal people for a change. In the midst of all of this, I was reminded of what makes me proud to be a Wildcat, but what we so often forget in the mundane— our relationships with one another.
The company made up some of its revenue shortfall by picking up an emergency contract in the state of West Virginia. At 9 p.m. on a Thursday night in March, Oakley got a call: “Can we figure out how to truck 500,000 meals next week into West Virginia?”
“Honestly, one of the big things we did – is that we said, “Yes,” Oakley remembered.
With the help of a shipping company, GFS, and a sister subsidiary of Compass Group, Chartwells arranged for the West Virginia National Guard to meet the delivery at the USDA site in West Virginia. From there, the Guard delivered meals to 25 counties. “We figured, if anybody can do it, it’s going to be us.”
“The parents were lined up for miles.”
Meanwhile, down in Texas, Everett had been working a pilot program to help 4,000 children in rural school districts get meals during the summer. Summer lunch is generally regarded as a hugely impactful social program, but there is a problem with it: Some kids, especially those in rural areas, can’t get to the central locations where the summer programs are run.
When the pandemic hit, Everett was in Washington, D.C. for meetings. Officials at the USDA asked him to scale up the pilot program immediately – from 4,000 to 300,000.
Like Oakley, he said yes. And then he wondered … how?
He issued an RFP, uncertain what he’d get. Nobody was delivering packed lunches to kids on this kind of scale.
“Belinda heard about it and called me,” he said. “She led her company to do some transformative things at the drop of the hat. We had sea planes dropping off boxes in Alaska. We had mule teams taking them in some Western states,” he said.
Ultimately, Baylor contracted with three vendors, McLane Global, PepsiCo Foundation’s Food for Good (PepsiCo), and Chartwells, which also handed the boxes for kids with food allergies. The food vendors in turn contracted with UPS and the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the packages — including to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where since 1930 mules have been taking mail to the Havasupai Indians.
It was the pandemic: Shipping was a mess, and shelf-stable food was hard to get. Things happened, like milk spoiling and spilling, so they turned to the powdered version in some cases. But the program was an overwhelming success, feeding 273,000 families with kids meals: breakfast, lunch and snacks. A study by the Urban Institute found it was as effective or more at reducing hunger (”food insecurity”) than regular summer lunch programs.
The stats surrounding the program are a good reminder of how much need exists in the United States — on a scale comparable to major disasters that draw headlines. Many of the school districts who took part in the program reported that nearly all the families in their districts lacked Internet access. Thirty-eight percent of the districts said many families lacked cell phone service. These are people whose access to food is limited in the best of times.
Before the end of the summer, the program had served 40 million meals.
Chartwells’ story isn’t all rosy. There were business realities that kicked in. Revenue declined from $800 million in 2019 to $750 million in fiscal year 2020. There were some layoffs, and some salaried employees not working on the front lines feeding children took a 20% pay cut for a few months, according to the company.
Everett said one of the things he learned was that people in a corporate setting could be just as passionate as his team. “I can’t imagine how many hours a week (Oakley) was working,” he said.
By September 2020, under Oakley’s leadership, Chartwells had temporarily completely re-engineered its business, and delivered 100 million meals.
As part of the surge of federal spending around the pandemic, the USDA had the funding to expand the school lunch program, so that very child in public schools could eat for free. It would have cost $11 billion to extend it, post-pandemic.
“This was a great thing for our industry,” Oakley said. “The pandemic shone a light to food insecurity. There was a better understanding for how important the USDA funded national school lunch program is. There is a vast population that is suffering from systemic poverty, that is one bad week away from not having enough to eat.”
But Congress let the free lunch program lapse. It has also failed to act to expand the rural summer lunch program, which would probably cost $150 million — not a huge investment in the scheme of things. It would likely have a huge impact on kids growing up in isolated settings.
“If they knew someone cared about them, teachers, superintendents, communities, what would that mean to them as they were growing up?” Everett said, connecting the isolation some kids feel with the surge of young men who have become mass shooters.
Summer meals for rural kids would require re-authorizing another piece of legislation and rewriting it to include the word “deliver.” That kind of basic legislative work is not being done now.
The Myth of the Hero
WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 17: Chef Jose Andres attends the 2019 American Portrait Gala at the ... [+]
World Central Kitchen benefits from marketing. The school lunch program on the whole performed marvelously well during the pandemic. But it doesn’t have a marketing department. As I wrote this story, I also started to reflect on the fact that Americans have a blind spot for communal action, which is probably our greatest strength. We do love our heroes — our Chef José Andréses — but feeding millions of meals actually requires teams, and government funds. If we started to be more honest about that, maybe we would build on what we’ve already done.
“One of the things we learned is that we do have the capability to tackle big problems if we all work together,” said Everett.
