Giving Compass' Take:

• Everytable is a restaurant concept that is intentionally set up in food deserts that offers a myriad of affordable, accessible food options for the surrounding community. 

• Why is this a sustainable model for addressing food deserts? 

• Read about why food deserts exist and the hopes we have to eliminate them. 

With the support of a large “Shark Tank” investment and in the midst of an already successful crowdfunding campaign, Everytable is a radical restaurant concept that serves meals with a side of social justice.

It brings healthful, grab-and-go dishes to food deserts — underserved communities with a lack of access to nutritious food — as well as affluent areas but charges based on the median income of the neighborhood. While low-income area residents may be able to get a food bowl at Everytable for $4 or $5, the same dish could be $7 or $8 in a more well-off community.

Customers can either heat up the food on site and eat in the restaurant or buy them in bulk and stock up their home refrigerators. It’s a store-restaurant hybrid that allows for quick in-and-out service.

A third of their locations are currently in food deserts, but they’re shooting for half as they expand. If all goes accordingly to plan and the team can show that their brand’s expansion works locally in LA, then they’ll start looking into nationwide outposts.

“The core reason we open in [food deserts] is because we believe healthy food is a human right,” says Polk, a former hedge-fund trader who now serves as Everytable’s CEO. “With the way food systems are structured right now, healthy food is something that’s a luxury product that’s only available in more affluent communities, so it’s part of the core belief of this company that every time we open in an affluent community we also have to be looking for the food-desert location to make sure [our food is] something everybody has access to.”

Read the full article about ending food deserts by  Jean Trinh at GOOD Magazine.