Sustainability & Social Impact
Because it's important to protect this blue-and-green marble we call home
La Cocina
La Cocina is a non-profit restaurant incubator located in San Francisco's Mission District. Their mission is to increase inclusivity in the food industry and offer equitable opportunity for living-wage work and asset generation.
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La Cocina supports businesses by providing an affordable commercial kitchen space, industry-specific technical assistance and access to market opportunities. They focus primarily on providing resources to women from communities of color and immigrant communities.
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At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, restaurants shut down. As the world slowly opened up dining, many restaurants were at a loss for how to navigate the pandemic, or continued to lose significant revenues.
We wanted to do something to help the community. Our group of volunteers partnered with La Cocina to develop a Restaurant Playbook for Navigating the Pandemic to help restaurants stay afloat and navigate the difficult changes to their operating models
The playbook focused on 5 key areas:
1. Covid-19 trends affecting the industry as a whole: highlighting the challenges restaurants are facing, and that it's widespread
2. Using Takeout to generate revenue: how restaurants can shift operations to optimize for takeout when dine-in isn't an option
3. Meal Kit & Pantry to diversify offerings: best practices from Bay Area restaurants implementing new models of "food service"
4. Profitably delivery: a guide to offering delivery, which is enticing during a pandemic, but requires thorough cost consideration
5. Socially distant dining models: cooking classes, experiential kits can offer additional revenue streams when core-food-service is slow
Bonus: Interactive financial model to calculate revenue, variable and fixed costs to stay afloat and manage debt during the pandemic
Some highlights from the work
Here for the impact?
Both the California Restaurant Association (CRA) and
the Oakland Chamber of Commerce (OCC) shared
our resources with 200+ restaurants!
A narrated version of the playlist also lives on YouTube >>>
Green Team
Green Team is an group of tree-huggers at Bain and Company who are passionate about sustainability, climate change, and making the world a better place, one "smaller footprint" at a time
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I led the Green Education committee, focused on helping our office learn more about sustainability as a whole, and tactically what they can do every-day to improve. We host webinars, such as with the head of Recology (the recycling provider of the Bay Area), help plan green-outing events (like beach cleanups and gardening sessions) and release a quarterly newsletter covering all sorts of topics from best plant-based restaurants in the Bay Area, California’s wildfire problem explained, New Year’s sustainability resolutions, and much more.
