Help Struggling Restaurants and Individuals (US)

In only a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has ruthlessly swept through the world, leaving a significant dent on the global economy. This pandemic has taken a toll on the workforce: in the US alone, over 22 million people have filed for unemployment, with more layoffs expected to come.

Many businesses have been forced to shut their doors; Asian restaurants are hit particularly hard. According to Restaurant Business Magazine, nearly 50% of all Chinese restaurants in the US have closed their doors as of April 13, 2020.

Appalled by these frightening statistics, we made it our mission at OpenMeal to support those who are now unemployed and food-insecure, while benefiting affected local restaurants at the same time.

The OpenMeal team consists of engineers, designers, product managers, and marketing experts from various backgrounds (and time zones!). While our platform may not directly help individuals regain financial stability, we are confident that it will alleviate financial burdens experienced by two of the most vulnerable communities suffering from COVID-19.

OpenMeal.org operates as follows:

1. As a donor, your contribution goes towards a pool of donations stored on our platform.

2. Every day, we divide this pool evenly among the restaurants and prepay restaurants for meals. The amount we pay to each restaurant is then displayed on our website as prepaid credit to be used at the restaurants by requesters.

3. Users who are in need of food can then sign up as requesters and claim this credit to order prepaid meals from our participating restaurants.

Participating restaurants:

Currently, we have partnered with four restaurants located in San Francisco Chinatown for our pilot run: China Live, Dim Sum Corner, Adam's Grub Truck, and Uji Time Dessert. We have also received interests from restaurants in other major metropolitan cities (including Seattle and Chicago) that are seeking to partner with us.

How we will use funds from this campaign:

- 90% of money raised will be deposited directly into our platform’s pool of donations so that requesters (users who are food-insecure) can start claiming credits and order meals immediately.

- 10% will be used to cover operating costs (including payments for website hosting, Heroku server, and design tools like Figma).

- We are setting a goal of $10,000 USD for this initial campaign. If we exceed this goal, we will continue to deposit 90% of funds directly into the donations pool.

Timeline:

After 3 weeks of building, our platform is fully operational. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be conducting our pilot run in the San Francisco Chinatown neighborhood. With the help of your contributions, we can rapidly expand and scale to other metropolitan areas in the coming months to aid as many restaurants and people as possible!

The OpenMeal Vision:

We hope that this unprecedented situation improves soon, but it is likely to be a long and slow path towards full recovery for both those who are in need and the small businesses who rely on them as customers. Our vision for this year is to scale our platform to major cities across the United States such as New York, Seattle, LA, Chicago and Texas. The $10,000 fund collected from GoFundMe is highly critical for our initial growth and launch in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood.

FAQ: visit here to view more Q&A

1) How much should I donate?

You can donate as little as a dollar or you can donate as much as your heart desires. Our platform is agnostic to the amount you donate.

2) How can I trust that OpenMeal will be using the money I donated appropriately?

We built this platform out of an altruistic desire to give back and help the community. 90% of the donations collected will go directly towards helping restaurants and people in need, and 10% will go towards the costs of running this nonprofit initiative. This includes the price of running the server and hosting for the website, as well as other costs associated with building/scaling.

At our current stage as a nonprofit startup, we are 100% reliant on donors like you to help us keep OpenMeal up and running. Our long term plan includes finding a way to make our platform more sustainable, so that we can use 100% of the donations to help as many communities and people in need as possible.

3) I am a restaurant owner, how do I sign up?

Sign up here and we will reach out to you within the next 48 hours.