Delivering Hope in San Francisco, One Meal at a Time

Back in April 2020, I joined forces with three other members of North Beach Neighbors in the midst of the new pandemic and shelter in place order to perform an experiment. The experiment would attempt to help keep our neighborhood restaurants and small businesses afloat during an unprecedented time in San Francisco’s history.

The idea was this: on Thursday evenings, we would promote a special menu from a local restaurant in our neighborhood, provide free delivery for the restaurant, provide free delivery for the consumer, and get our local community to volunteer in getting the food from the restaurant into people’s bellies.

One week later, we met at our first restaurant, Piazza Pelligrini, to deliver 17 meals by foot and drove over $1500. The immediate success was quite the surprise and only one question came to mind: could we do this again? Would anyone show up for a second week?

Fast forward one year later and our group North Beach Delivers has worked with over 50 small businesses and generated over $150,000 in revenue. Over 25 volunteers stepped up to serve their community and we delivered meals to hundreds of unique customers. Many folks ordered from us every single week. We delivered lots within North Beach, yes, but we also had regular customers in Chinatown, Jackson Square, Russian Hill, and Nob Hill.

We worked with local dives all the way Michelin star restaurants and our work inspired other San Francisco communities to start their own delivery programs.

Never in our wildest dreams did we expect this program to take off in the way that it did. We couldn’t have done it without the support of our local small businesses, our neighbors, our partners, and of course, our volunteers.

Sadly, this week will be our last week delivering for North Beach Delivers. We are in the fortunate position of watching our city reopen and many of the restaurants we have supported over the last year are too busy and no longer need our help. This is exactly the situation we were hoping to be in!

Keep your eyes peeled for more from this group and North Beach Neighbors as a whole as we continue to find ways to support our neighborhood in recovery.

Danny Sauter
Eric Dew
Sri Artham
Teddy Kramer