Best Beverage Catering’s Pandemic Journey: From Catering Big Events to Feeding Kids

During the pandemic, most all food businesses and organizations were upended. At Feeding San Diego, there was an unforeseen increase in demand for food assistance. For Best Beverage Catering, a company that normally works with major music and entertainment venues including Music Box, SOMA, and Quartyard in downtown San Diego, it was the opposite. When the pandemic hit, all venues in San Diego closed their doors. Like so many businesses, this drastic shift upended Best Beverage’s whole business model and the future was extremely uncertain.  

A Partnership Forms 

In July 2020, Feeding San Diego had a surge in need at meal distribution sites that are part of its Youth Meals Program. We needed additional vendors to help prepare more meals to be distributed at 13 sites across the county. After a bid process, Best Beverage Catering was chosen to help satisfy this need and has spent almost a year preparing food for an unlikely audience…kids! Fortunately, this partnership helped keep them going during the constant ups and downs that enduring a global pandemic brought about. 

“It definitely wasn’t part of our business model before, working with non-profits,” shares Shannon MacIntyre, San Diego Area Manager at Best Beverage Catering. “This was a great opportunity for us to give back to the community and be able to keep people at our company employed. We kept anywhere between 10-15 people employed during the pandemic specifically for this purpose.” 

Since July 2020, Best Beverage Catering has delivered meals daily to 13 sites and has helped Feeding San Diego serve over 100,000 meals to San Diego County kids. MacIntyre shares that while they didn’t get to interact with any of the kids during this time, they received positive feedback from the sites about how much the kids loved the food, which included meals like protein banana pancakes for breakfast and grilled chicken taco salad for lunch.  

“Best Beverage took on most of our recreation center sites to start and allowed us to increase our total sites from 11 in June 2020 to 25 by the end of July 2020 and eventually 28 by the end of August 2020,” shares Nico Sidorakis, Programs Manager at Feeding San Diego. “They have been an incredible vendor to work with and provide high quality, nutritious meals to kids facing hunger.” 

Lessons Learned 

As San Diego continues to reopen, Best Beverage Catering’s partnership with Feeding San Diego will come to a close at the end of June, when they will get back to their original business model of catering events and operating music venues. But the company has some major takeaways from the experience.  

“We learned about the lack of accessibility that kids have to food. The need is so much greater than you see on a day-to-day basis. It was interesting to see how much of a need there was now that kids weren’t in school and didn’t have programs providing it for them,” said MacIntyre. “You go about your life, your day, do your work and you don’t really think about that aspect. It was nice to refocus during this time of need. Instead of, we have to make money, it was more about what can we do to help. Everyone from our team took a lot away from that.”