Thank you so much for being part of Business of Purpose!
In this month's issue, we are taking a deep dive into Everytable, an amazing, purpose-driven company that offers various learnings and inspiration to build a more equitable way of doing business. Every....who? Well, if you don't know them yet, even better! Because you are in for a ride into a land where business empowers and nourishes marginalized communities. Let's go!
What's Everytable?
The New York Times calls it “The Amazon of Quinoa Bowls”, Freethink names it “The Restaurant Hacking Capitalism” and Elon Musks' brother Kimbal Musk as well as US supermarket giant Kroger are investors. So what is it?
Everytable is a Los Angeles-based social enterprise with the mission to make fresh, nutritious meals affordable for everyone. The company’s main business is its neighborhood stores where it sells fresh and nutritious, ready-to-eat meals. However, it also runs a meal subscription service with delivery and pick-up options and sells a smart vending machine stocked with healthy and fresh food for offices, college campuses, medical buildings, etc.
But Everytable is much more! The company offers super valuable lessons and ideas for any purpose-driven entrepreneur or business on various fronts. So let’s get into the nitty-gritty insights and learn how Everytable is able to…
Sell nutritious food at affordable prices,
Empower low-income communities,
Turn everyday people into skilled business owners,
and repurpose millions of Wall-Street money for good.
LEARN | Robin Hood Pricing Model
Everyone who has ordered food at a hip salad bar knows that healthy food usually comes with a higher price tag. Fresh ingredients are sadly still more expensive than highly processed ones. For example, a cheeseburger at McDonald's in Berlin costs €1,59 compared to a €9 veggie bowl at a local Dean & David salad bar. This is a huge problem for those with low income who often have to spend up to 50%of their income on food.
“The chicken tinga is the same in both Los Angeles establishments: It’s a bowl of pasture-raised chicken, lentils, quinoa and black beans. At the University Park outpost of Everytable, it costs $5.10. In Monterey Park, a 15-minute drive away, it’s $8.35.” writes Jane Black in the NY Times article.
Everytable operates with a so-called variable pricing model which means that their products cost less in areas with students and working-class families and more in neighborhoods with prime real estate. It’s basically Robin Hood baked into the system where affluent customers pay, with each purpose, for the affordable prices that Everytable is then able to offer in lower-income communities. Genius! This system is even leading expansion decisions with the company launching in a lower-income area always at about the same time it opens an outpost in a higher-income neighborhood.
LEARN | Integrated Supply Chain
The variable pricing model is not the only thing that allows Everytable to sell healthy and fresh food at affordable prices. Rather than having each store fitted out with a small kitchen and kitchen staff where food is prepared, Everytable is preparing and packaging all of the food for its various stores in one central, industrial-style kitchen, at scale, and then delivers it with food trucks to all Everytable stores or directly to customers.
As meals are prepared off-site, the company doesn’t need a lot of spacefor its stores which are only 500-700 square feet small with merely two employees. This doesn’t only save Evertyable property-related costs but also a massive amount of equipment and labor costs. Moreover, this centralized model enables Everytable to scale more quickly and expand to new neighborhoods in a city with relatively few extra costs and work involved.
The New York Times article points out that: “Everytable’s financials bear this out: The average cost to produce and package an Everytable meal is about $3.25 — still a 35 percent margin if you sell a meal for $5. Company models also show that preparing all its food in a central commissary reduces the cost of building out each store by 75 percent.”
LEARN | Economic Empowerment
According to Freethink, “there are about 750,000 franchise establishments in the U.S. today and virtually all of the entrepreneurs who opened those franchises had to prove good credit and put down a lot of cash. For example, opening a McDonald’s franchise requires an initial investment of at least $500,000 in non-borrowed capital.”
Everytable seeks to change this system and empower people from lower-income communities to become business owners with an innovative franchise model. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Polk, explains:
"We believe that talent is equally distributed but capital is not. So, it's finding these people and taking that money and lending it to the entrepreneurs to build their businesses, and we can benefit from the franchise benefits. Everytable has always been about creating a more just and equal world. We did that through the pricing and the food, and now this is like the capstone of our mission through economic empowerment."
So how does this work? Well, big foundations and wealth management groups usually invest their money into the stock market before using it for specific projects. But what if they’d take some of that money and invest it in the education and development of entrepreneurs from low-income communities? In the case of Everytable, organizations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation and Dignity Health provide the low-interest loans needed for new franchises and pay franchise-owners a guaranteed annual salary of $40,000 for the first three years.
And then, through Everytable’s University program, people from marginalized communities can apply to become franchise owners and to take part in a fully paid training program that combines comprehensive on-the-job training with executive business leadership coursework while working as a store manager at an Everytable location. The franchise owners will ultimately be able to pay off the loans via the profits coming from the store which means the capital goes back to Everytable as well as the organizations that provided the funding. And everyone is happy!
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That's not all! There is even more to Everytable that is inspiring, like its Pay it Forward program that lets customers buy a meal for a person in need, or how the company leverages partnerships with other purpose-driven businesses on similar missions, and Everytable’s amazing and clear branding: The brand’s slogan, for example, is 'Just. Good. Food', brilliantly encapsulating its purpose around food justice and economic empowerment, healthy, nutritious food, and doing good.
If you want to dive deeper into Everytable, here are some great sources:
Interesting articles our community members have been sharing on our Slack this month?
Netflix surpasses 50% employee representation for women, diverse race & ethnicity
Denmark is planning to store millions of tonnes of CO2 under the seabed
Italy signed a new constitutional law that says that the state must safeguard the environment, biodiversity and the ecosystem
Doctors in British Columbia can now prescribe a year-long pass to Canada's national parks as treatment
Coca Cola's Innocent Drinks brand saw26 greenwashing complaints against its ad, which painted a picture of a more eco-friendly world
Indonesia is migrating its capital because Jakarta is sinking into the ocean
A list of 80 examples of brand purpose (in Spanish)
COMMUNITY | What Have We Been Up To?
What have our community members been up to this month?
Ida Svenonius is currently running a weekly webinar series (soon to be a podcast) exploring the role of marketing in society and trying to define how marketing for positive change looks like. Sign up here to register for upcoming sessions or watch lots of previous recordings on her YouTube.
Ali Özgür Arslan shared a 2021 Impact Report that his company ATÖLYE put together
Tom RoverslaunchedClimateClass, a 2-day training for innovators, product owners and managers to learn how to develop sustainable products and services.
Remi Saint-Jean is asking all early-stage impact entrepreneurs focusing on social or environmental impact to share their experiences for his survey.
