In June 2023, Rethink Food partnered with McKinsey & Company to look at the social, economic and environmental impacts of our restaurant program, and how investing locally in small businesses and restaurants can foster a more equitable and sustainable food system. The preliminary assessment suggested that compared to alternate models of engaging large catering companies to provide food provision at scale, Rethink’s model has greater economic impact on local communities and small businesses, including a higher share of spending with local (NYC-based) vendors and higher spending with other small and medium businesses (SMBs). As much as 75% of meal funding through Rethink’s Model stays local in NYC and 48% stays hyper-local (i.e., within the same borough). Additionally, it generates more jobs in communities and this, in turn, contributes to wages that permeate through the local economy and increase demand for the supply chain and consumer goods, creating a multiplier effect. This highlights an opportunity to scale Rethink’s model to promote economic and community development. It also primarily supports minority- or women-owned businesses, and, the vast majority of staff in these restaurants belong to minority populations (96%).

Throughout the study, Rethink had already been contracted with NYC Health and Hospitals (NYC H+H) since February 2023 to provide meals to the Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Respite Centers (HERRCs) and other temporary shelters with a two-fold purpose – to provide high quality, culturally competent meals to a diverse migrant population and bring SMBs into the City contracting process, which has historically been challenging for SMBs to participate in. 

 

Building off the preliminary results of this study and Rethink’s more recent contracting work with NYC H+H, there are several opportunities to take a deeper look at the implications of scaling Rethink’s model for government contracting. In partnership with the NYU graduate students, we are looking to garner deeper recommendations and guidance on how we should scale our government contracting work, with whom, and the size and scope of this expansion.

Aspects of this project would include building on the initial McKinsey analysis to further expand our landscape analysis around: food/meal provision pricing across various NYC agencies, reviewing scope/compliance across previous NYC food contracts, process and pricing differences between emergency vs. ongoing contracting needs; diversity of food suppliers/contractors, and landscape of small businesses that might plug into the work Rethink is doing; additional services and approaches that would be helpful for Rethink to pursue and offer to its contracting partners  (e.g. group purchasing).

It would also include recommendations on local, state and federal agencies that are mission aligned and could engage with Rethink more formally with the goal of contracting for high quality meal provision on an ongoing/steady state basis. This would include a recommended framework for a formal public private partnership model where Rethink is a hub connecting NYC to a vast network of SMB meal providers, and could draw from New Jersey’s Sustain and Serve program and other comparable models.

Finally, it would include garnering best practices via interviews on organizational structure and scale to support government contracting work from other peer organizations already participating in year over year government contracting (e.g City Meals on Wheels, God’s Love We Deliver).

By way of the partnership with NYU, we are hoping to have a broader understanding of the City food contracting landscape, and success would look like practical, scalable recommendations on how and over what time we could potentially shape this work. Ultimately, it would be great to have these findings coalesced into one final deliverable document laying out the aforementioned areas. Measurable results could look like, average cost per meal and snacks across agencies and benchmarking that against our current work, an analysis of potential agencies that we are not currently working with and through what programming in their agencies we could apply for RFPs (including timeline of funding opportunities), standard compliance areas across food contracting (like the Good Food Purchasing Program) or additional compliance areas Rethink should consider, benchmarking the racial/ethnic and gender diversity of NYC food contractors against Rethink’s current network.