5.18.20 Choicelunch Mercury News Article.pdf
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Part of Choicelunch Pivots Business Model to Avoid Shutdown
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5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
NewsCalifornia News • News
How one East Bay business shifted
gears to avoid shutting down
during the coronavirus pandemic
Rather than shut down until August, school lunch
provider Choicelunch leveraged its supply chain to
serve a broader market
By NATE GARTRELL | ngartrell@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: May 10, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: May 11, 2020 at 10:03 a.m.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
1/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
DANVILLE, CA – APRIL 23: Choicelunch CEO Justin Gagnon is
photographed outside their facility in Danville, Calif., on Friday, May 1,
2020. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
In mid-March, Justin Gagnon was faced with the very real prospect that the
coronavirus pandemic — and the shelter-in-place orders California issued in
response — would cripple the business he spent decades building.
With two college friends, Gagnon founded Choicelunch, a business that
contracted to prepare and deliver meals to schoolchildren across the state. As
campuses shutdown, rst in the Bay Area and then across the state, the
company’s revenue stream suddenly dried up, likely until fall at the earliest.
Faced with the very real threat of having to lay off his 200 employees and shut
down the business, Gagnon instead pivoted the company’s business model
entirely.
Taking advantage of the fact that Choicelunch’s distributors now had excess
supply because of the drop off in restaurant business, the company began
selling groceries and meals at designated drop-off zones in the Bay Area, as well
as at senior living communities. In Southern California, they’ve also contracted
with homeless shelters, preparing hundreds of meals, seven days a week, for
some of the state’s most vulnerable residents. The move saved 40 jobs at
Choicelunch.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
2/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
Gagnon’s parents were in the catering business, and he swore as a child he
wouldn’t work in meal prep. But after graduating from University of Notre
Dame, in Indiana, he founded Choicelunch with Keith Cosbey and Ryan Mariotti,
two fellow members of an a cappella group called The Undertones, evolving the
business from his parent’s Danville catering company. In the pre-coronavirus
world, Choicelunch delivered meals to 250 schools across California.
Q: So, COVID-19 hit, and schools were shut down inde nitely. What was
your initial reaction when you realized this was happening to your
business?
A: Well, it water-falled, from schools running at full-bore to no more lunches in
three days. And what was really interesting was that I think the prevailing
opinion at that time was, ‘Ok we’re gonna shut down for two weeks while the
virus passes us by, and then we’ll be back to business as usual.’ Whereas, we
were doing a lot of research about how other countries were faring [with the
virus] and sort of overlaying our situation in California and we pretty quickly
came to an understanding that we weren’t coming back to schools here.
Our rst inclination was that if we had to make it through to August, maybe the
best thing to do was go into full hibernation mode — essentially, reduce the
company to zero heads. That’s one of the options we considered. The big
challenge I had with that was obviously we’ve got a lot of people who rely on our
company. That just didn’t sit to me, to go into a cave until August.
We were also taking a look at what was happening at the stores, with there
being empty shelves everywhere. My brothers were texting me saying, ‘Hey can
you get me a chicken through your suppliers?’ or, ‘Is there any way you guys
could get cheese?’ It was kind of getting clear to me that people didn’t want to
go to stores. And the supply chain in retail was really unreliable.
Q: How did you craft this new business model and how much time did you
have to do it?
A: We had an all-hands meeting with our team where we told everyone, ‘We’re
gonna need to take all our salary people to hourly and reduce hours and we’re
going to try and lock it down. But we’re gonna do everything we can to keep
everybody here and get back to work.’ Over the course of the next few days, we
were able to start a contract with Orange County, to do breakfast, lunch, and
dinner [for homeless residents], seven days a week.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
3/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
We were able to put that together to keep 10 people working. At the same time,
we started reaching out to counties out here. When we weren’t getting any
traction there, that’s when I started hearing from families, and we started
looking at Safeway.com or Instacart. Items were sold out and deliveries were 10
days out. So my partner Keith checked on our suppliers, and we found a lot of
them had stocked up the week before all this started happening. We put
together a website, and brought it live, and it just kind of blew up from there.
We started up with three lanes [at our Danville location] and we just place each
person’s order in their trunk and let them go on our way. When it worked well in
Danville, we set it up at our San Jose kitchens as well. Then we got a call from
Rossmoor [in Walnut Creek], and started setting up mobile offerings. From
there, we launched another mobile location in Lafayette. We’re starting to
branch a little bit more into prepared foods as well. We have a Mother’s Day
package coming up, we’re trying to do things to make peoples’ holidays a little
bit better.
Q: How were you able to have a ready-made supply chain so quickly, given
how high demand for produce became?
A: This is all product that would normally be in the food service supply chain,
but you saw food service demand just decrease across the board. One of the
things we’ve heard from our customers is, ‘This is incredible, you need to do this
more when the shelter in place is lifted because the quality is amazing.’ This is
product that would normally be in restaurant stockroom for a bit, going direct to
the consumer’s hand. So the freshness and quality is something people have
been really excited about.
My instinct tells me this supply line will remain intact but it is also fragile and
we’re going to need to be patient. A great example is we had mandarins listed on
our website, they were easy to get, but then all of a sudden my partner told me,
‘Mandarins are off the table. We can’t get mandarins anymore.’ So I think those
are the types of things we’ll continue to see, slight disruptions here and there
that may lead to limited selection, compared to what we’re used to having.
Q: Has COVID-19 brought about an increased demand for homeless shelter
services? How was it that Orange County came to reach out to you around
the same time as the shelter-in-place?
A: It’s very interesting how that happened. The of ce of emergency
management kept calling me and asking if I ran another business. I got multiple
calls in one day from different people in Orange County. It turned out, it was a
business that was in our old Huntington Beach kitchen. So I asked them, ‘What
are you guys looking for?’ They told us they needed someone to do prepared
meal delivery for a few homeless sites. I said, ‘Well, actually, that’s kind of what
we do.’ It was a crazy twist of fate, actually.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
4/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
Q: Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel? And how will things change
when schools nally return?
A: We’ve already been preparing for that. For 16 to 17 years, we’ve operated
with a lunchroom type concept where the parent pre-orders the entree and the
student can select from a variety of snacks and fruits and vegetables. We’ve
gone through the process of seeing what a COVID-19 cafeteria looks like, and
we’re looking at the concept of having all our schools migrating to an online, a
la carte program, where you can essentially operate without a lunchroom. You
can have kids picking up their lunch in a socially-distanced fashion, or lunches
pre-packed and delivered direct to the classroom.
Justin Gagnon
Position: CEO of Choicelunch
Previous jobs: Caterer
Education: University of Notre Dame
FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT JUSTIN:
Visited 25 National Parks on an 8,300-mile trip throughout the Western US
and Canada in an RV with his wife and their four kids
Started Choicelunch with two friends from an a cappella group, The
Undertones, at the University of Notre Dame
Accomplished tenor, who sings in the San Ramon Valley Chorale.
Travelled from Denver to New York 27 times in an 11-month span to visit
his now wife
Once meditated for 600 days straight after a friend challenged him. Upon
breaking the streak, he stopped meditating entirely.
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How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
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6/6
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
NewsCalifornia News • News
How one East Bay business shifted
gears to avoid shutting down
during the coronavirus pandemic
Rather than shut down until August, school lunch
provider Choicelunch leveraged its supply chain to
serve a broader market
By NATE GARTRELL | ngartrell@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: May 10, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: May 11, 2020 at 10:03 a.m.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
1/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
DANVILLE, CA – APRIL 23: Choicelunch CEO Justin Gagnon is
photographed outside their facility in Danville, Calif., on Friday, May 1,
2020. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
In mid-March, Justin Gagnon was faced with the very real prospect that the
coronavirus pandemic — and the shelter-in-place orders California issued in
response — would cripple the business he spent decades building.
With two college friends, Gagnon founded Choicelunch, a business that
contracted to prepare and deliver meals to schoolchildren across the state. As
campuses shutdown, rst in the Bay Area and then across the state, the
company’s revenue stream suddenly dried up, likely until fall at the earliest.
Faced with the very real threat of having to lay off his 200 employees and shut
down the business, Gagnon instead pivoted the company’s business model
entirely.
Taking advantage of the fact that Choicelunch’s distributors now had excess
supply because of the drop off in restaurant business, the company began
selling groceries and meals at designated drop-off zones in the Bay Area, as well
as at senior living communities. In Southern California, they’ve also contracted
with homeless shelters, preparing hundreds of meals, seven days a week, for
some of the state’s most vulnerable residents. The move saved 40 jobs at
Choicelunch.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
2/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
Gagnon’s parents were in the catering business, and he swore as a child he
wouldn’t work in meal prep. But after graduating from University of Notre
Dame, in Indiana, he founded Choicelunch with Keith Cosbey and Ryan Mariotti,
two fellow members of an a cappella group called The Undertones, evolving the
business from his parent’s Danville catering company. In the pre-coronavirus
world, Choicelunch delivered meals to 250 schools across California.
Q: So, COVID-19 hit, and schools were shut down inde nitely. What was
your initial reaction when you realized this was happening to your
business?
A: Well, it water-falled, from schools running at full-bore to no more lunches in
three days. And what was really interesting was that I think the prevailing
opinion at that time was, ‘Ok we’re gonna shut down for two weeks while the
virus passes us by, and then we’ll be back to business as usual.’ Whereas, we
were doing a lot of research about how other countries were faring [with the
virus] and sort of overlaying our situation in California and we pretty quickly
came to an understanding that we weren’t coming back to schools here.
Our rst inclination was that if we had to make it through to August, maybe the
best thing to do was go into full hibernation mode — essentially, reduce the
company to zero heads. That’s one of the options we considered. The big
challenge I had with that was obviously we’ve got a lot of people who rely on our
company. That just didn’t sit to me, to go into a cave until August.
We were also taking a look at what was happening at the stores, with there
being empty shelves everywhere. My brothers were texting me saying, ‘Hey can
you get me a chicken through your suppliers?’ or, ‘Is there any way you guys
could get cheese?’ It was kind of getting clear to me that people didn’t want to
go to stores. And the supply chain in retail was really unreliable.
Q: How did you craft this new business model and how much time did you
have to do it?
A: We had an all-hands meeting with our team where we told everyone, ‘We’re
gonna need to take all our salary people to hourly and reduce hours and we’re
going to try and lock it down. But we’re gonna do everything we can to keep
everybody here and get back to work.’ Over the course of the next few days, we
were able to start a contract with Orange County, to do breakfast, lunch, and
dinner [for homeless residents], seven days a week.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
3/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
We were able to put that together to keep 10 people working. At the same time,
we started reaching out to counties out here. When we weren’t getting any
traction there, that’s when I started hearing from families, and we started
looking at Safeway.com or Instacart. Items were sold out and deliveries were 10
days out. So my partner Keith checked on our suppliers, and we found a lot of
them had stocked up the week before all this started happening. We put
together a website, and brought it live, and it just kind of blew up from there.
We started up with three lanes [at our Danville location] and we just place each
person’s order in their trunk and let them go on our way. When it worked well in
Danville, we set it up at our San Jose kitchens as well. Then we got a call from
Rossmoor [in Walnut Creek], and started setting up mobile offerings. From
there, we launched another mobile location in Lafayette. We’re starting to
branch a little bit more into prepared foods as well. We have a Mother’s Day
package coming up, we’re trying to do things to make peoples’ holidays a little
bit better.
Q: How were you able to have a ready-made supply chain so quickly, given
how high demand for produce became?
A: This is all product that would normally be in the food service supply chain,
but you saw food service demand just decrease across the board. One of the
things we’ve heard from our customers is, ‘This is incredible, you need to do this
more when the shelter in place is lifted because the quality is amazing.’ This is
product that would normally be in restaurant stockroom for a bit, going direct to
the consumer’s hand. So the freshness and quality is something people have
been really excited about.
My instinct tells me this supply line will remain intact but it is also fragile and
we’re going to need to be patient. A great example is we had mandarins listed on
our website, they were easy to get, but then all of a sudden my partner told me,
‘Mandarins are off the table. We can’t get mandarins anymore.’ So I think those
are the types of things we’ll continue to see, slight disruptions here and there
that may lead to limited selection, compared to what we’re used to having.
Q: Has COVID-19 brought about an increased demand for homeless shelter
services? How was it that Orange County came to reach out to you around
the same time as the shelter-in-place?
A: It’s very interesting how that happened. The of ce of emergency
management kept calling me and asking if I ran another business. I got multiple
calls in one day from different people in Orange County. It turned out, it was a
business that was in our old Huntington Beach kitchen. So I asked them, ‘What
are you guys looking for?’ They told us they needed someone to do prepared
meal delivery for a few homeless sites. I said, ‘Well, actually, that’s kind of what
we do.’ It was a crazy twist of fate, actually.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
4/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
Q: Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel? And how will things change
when schools nally return?
A: We’ve already been preparing for that. For 16 to 17 years, we’ve operated
with a lunchroom type concept where the parent pre-orders the entree and the
student can select from a variety of snacks and fruits and vegetables. We’ve
gone through the process of seeing what a COVID-19 cafeteria looks like, and
we’re looking at the concept of having all our schools migrating to an online, a
la carte program, where you can essentially operate without a lunchroom. You
can have kids picking up their lunch in a socially-distanced fashion, or lunches
pre-packed and delivered direct to the classroom.
Justin Gagnon
Position: CEO of Choicelunch
Previous jobs: Caterer
Education: University of Notre Dame
FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT JUSTIN:
Visited 25 National Parks on an 8,300-mile trip throughout the Western US
and Canada in an RV with his wife and their four kids
Started Choicelunch with two friends from an a cappella group, The
Undertones, at the University of Notre Dame
Accomplished tenor, who sings in the San Ramon Valley Chorale.
Travelled from Denver to New York 27 times in an 11-month span to visit
his now wife
Once meditated for 600 days straight after a friend challenged him. Upon
breaking the streak, he stopped meditating entirely.
Report an error
Policies and Standards
Contact Us
Start your weekday with all the news you need, from the Bay Area
and beyond.
Get the Morning Report newsletter
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
5/6
5/18/2020
How one East Bay business shifted gears to avoid shutdown during pandemic
Enter your email
SIGN UP
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SPONSORED CONTENT
In 1676 A Possessed Nun
Wrote A Message From The
Devil. Now the Chilling
Letter Has...
By
Tags: Homelessness, K-12 Education, Photo Galleries, Regional,
SV 2020
Nate Gartrell | Contra Costa County courts reporter Nate
Gartrell covers crime and corruption in Contra Costa
County. He joined the Bay Area News Group in 2014.
ngartrell@bayareanewsgroup.com
Follow Nate Gartrell @NateGartrell
SUBSCRIBE TODAY!
ALL ACCESS DIGITAL OFFER FOR JUST 99 CENTS!
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/10/how-one-east-bay-business-shifted-gears-to-avoid-shutting-down-during-the-coronavirus-pande…
6/6
Accrual Method (Dublin Core)
4301