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Family Meal for ATX Restaurants


Minamoto Foods has been fortunate over the last twelve years to be partnered with the local chef community as the city has grown and evolved. As this network of chefs have gone from concept to concept, so has our business, a steady organic growth with this rising tide. From one van and a tiny warehouse, to now, 11 trucks, over 40 employees, and our reach expanding into the Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio Markets.

Over the past month, as many in our industry were called into emergency meetings, we too have had long hard discussions about who we are as a company in these critical moments, how we will survive for our team, and what we can do in our current capacity to help our community to get past these difficult times.

The whole Food-Supply-Chain has been affected by the current crisis. We are a food distributor. We are the connected to Chefs. We are connected to Suppliers. We are the connection between these Chefs and Suppliers.

In turn, we have decided to leverage our position in the community, to connect donated foods with volunteer chefs and borrowed kitchen spaces, to start our Family Meal Initiative; a commissary kitchen to provide free to-go meals for Austin's service industry. The Family Meal name, a homage to the communal meals that we have cooked for Each Other, every day, in all of our restaurants; a small sense of normalcy in an unprecedented time full of unknowns.

Minamoto has run point on the program while also donating the raw materials for the kitchen, with Chef John Gocong of Rock and Roll’s Sushi in Cedar Park and a team of volunteers to curate and execute menus, and the Nova Hospitality team (Nova Kitchen, TenTen and Devil May Care) running pick-up logistics. In our current capacity we are providing 3-400 meals on Tuesday and Thursday, available for contactless pickup at TenTen. A menu is posted each weekend for the following week. We work directly with restaurants to coordinate meals for their staffs, while also reaching individuals through our #familymeal Social Media campaign. We focus on nourishing and soulful foods, efficiently produced in large quanitities, utilizing sustainable seafood and meats paired with vegetables and grains. The current goal is to cook up to 300 meals per day, for the foreseeable future.

To sustain and grow the Family Meal program, we have earnestly started fundraising. Understandably, calls-to-action and donation requests are emerging every day, thus, in this crowded fundraising market, we are struggling to find an audience for direct monetary donations for our initiative. Minamoto has traditionally only conducted business directly with restaurants, but will begin to pivot to retail and direct-to-consumer sales in an effort to raise funds for Family Meal. These new streams of business will offer seafood, packaged in one pound increments, sold both online and in-store; at Salt and Time on E 7th Street, and at Spread & Co on W 38th Street. Austin Euwald at Spread and Co will be hosting the “Spread and Company” popup market Sunday, April the 26th from 9am- 1pm, on their porch. The market will feature Minamoto Seafood and Meal-Kits, Vegetables from Cawoods Produce, and Pantry items from Spread & Co. To further Minamoto’s #familymeal effort, 50% of these proceeds will go directly towards the Family Meal Program.

All revenue raised through retail sales and the gofundme will be used to supplement a payroll for chefs that Minamoto can bring on for the program. The program started with volunteers and will continue to grow with the help of volunteers; however, the hope is to raise enough money to hire a staff of displaced chefs, within CDC guidelines allowing enough space to safely work.

Minamoto is starting this effort in hopes that like-minded companies and local corporations will join in their efforts to feed their own in these most critical moments. For now, we are simply trying to keep up with the demand for meals; feeding the community that normally feeds our community. We look forward to seeing how Austin comes together in the days ahead and want to be in the middle of creating and driving a positive direction. We are from Austin, and we will do all that we can in our city’s most pressing crisis.


Thank you for your consideration,

- The Team at Minamoto Foods

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Donations 

  • Anonymous
    • $100 
    • 4 yrs
  • Anonymous
    • $30 
    • 4 yrs
  • libbey, @bread4thepeople goldberg
    • $185 
    • 4 yrs
  • Anonymous
    • $20 
    • 4 yrs
  • Anonymous
    • $50 
    • 4 yrs
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Fundraising team (2)

chong choe
Organizer
Raised $20 from 1 donation
Austin, TX
Julian Choi
Team member
Raised $25 from 1 donation
This team raised $6,158 from 44 other donations.

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