A local non-profit organization launched an easily accessible website for people to find details on how to support small businesses after dine-in options become less available to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The outreach team at Hawaii Food & Wine Festival distributed masks to restaurant workers who picked up the support packages in their cars outside of HFWF’s office in Kaimuki. Hawaii Food & Wine Festival
December 1, 2020
HONOLULU — The onset of the coronavirus outbreak cued chefs to assemble a survival plan for restaurants as “We’re Open!” signs flipped around.
The Hawaii Agricultural Foundation and Hawai’i Food & Wine Festival came together, remotely, and founded Food-A-Go-Go to provide the community with information on restaurants that are open for takeout, delivery, or curbside pickup during the wavering restrictions imposed by local government authorities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a free community initiative to promote businesses that support local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen in Hawai’i.
Over 1,700 restaurants have been submitted to Food-A-Go-Go’s website with hopes to receive more customers.
According to Colleen Young Teramae, HFWF culinary coordinator and member of the outreach team, her boss and CEO Denise Hayashi Yamaguchi came up with the idea “overnight” to launch the nonprofit campaign. Yamaguchi knew small businesses would struggle to stay open after being forced to pause dine-in operations.
“There’s less than ten of us on the team, so we all met on Zoom after we stopped working in the office in mid March. We put together a PSA that featured chefs such as Roy Yamaguchi, who is one of our co-chairs and owner of Roy’s restaurant, encouraging viewers to keep patronizing restaurants when they could and if they could,” explained Teramae.
The Food-A-Go-Go website allows restaurants to submit their business and provide accurate information on where they are located, their hours of operation, the types of services they offer and what kind of food they serve. It also allows the public to submit their favorite eateries in the case that business owners are not familiar with Food-A-Go-Go and its platform to support small businesses.
“There’s a lot of restaurants that are owned by immigrants or [people who] are of advanced age and they don’t get on the computer as much. So their patrons came forward and filled out forms to put smaller restaurants on the site,” said Teramae.
In the summer, the outreach team of women at HFWF ran a promotion in partnership with Barclays, a British multinational financial services company who supplied the funding, and bought $100 gift cards from restaurants who use Food-A-Go-Go and hosted sweepstakes. The organization gave away ten $100 gift cards every day in June to encourage people to support Hawaii’s businesses whether by dine-in or take-out because they, like other restaurants across the nation, have been impacted by the pandemic and many have permanently closed.
“On the website you can see which restaurants have closed, and it is a significant number. It is hard to do business because of the high rents,” Teramae added.
Kevin Suehiro owns Nabeya Maido, a Japanese hot pot restaurant in Honolulu, and is one of many chefs who have benefitted from the advancement created by Food-A-Go-Go.
When asked how the non-profit helped him manage his business Suehiro responded, “Food-A-Go-Go was valuable as a source of information for us restaurants and tried to keep us on top of what was going on. They informed us about restrictions, regulations and what kind of grants and loans were coming out from the government and mayor. It was also a place small businesses could turn to to get the latest news and updates on what was being discussed in the legislature.”
“The PPP and government city grant is what pulled us through. I started delivering microwavable broths and reaching out to schools and hospitals to get back up to 50% of gross sales from our drop to 20% in July and August. Without the microwavables I would have been gone three months ago,” elaborated Suehiro.
According to Suehiro, Food-A-Go-Go also teamed up with Elite Parking, a parking service in Hawaii, to offer a delivery system to locals which he used for his business.
Not only does Food-A-Go-Go coordinate with chefs and restaurant customers, it also teams with other local organizations that have the same desire to support local restaurants and keep Hawaii’s economy going. Mahi Pono, a farming company on Maui, donated face masks that were distributed to restaurants who signed up on Food-A-Go-Go.
For three months Food-A-Go-Go put together a “kokua box” which contained fresh produce for restaurant and hotel workers who were affected by the pandemic whether they were losing hours or lost their jobs completely.
$200 Visa cards were also given to restaurant workers who applied to receive one as long as they were employed three months prior to when the pandemic started to affect work hours.
Food-A-Go-Go’s user-friendly site allows users to browse for farmers markets which have increased since farmers relied mainly on restaurants to buy their product.
The entire supply chain has been severely impacted because most restaurants in Hawaii want to order locally grown food. Prior to mandates that limited large gatherings such as weddings, banquets and big parties, farmers had many buyers but now they struggle to make business.