“But then, delicious food can be a real comfort when the rest of their lives are disrupted.” Over the course of the pandemic, Off the Grid facilitated the delivery of 1.3 million meals with a “rotating list of options, so people can constantly be delighted,” targeting customers ranging from temporary shelters to immunocompromised consumers residing at home. “People don’t think of food being delivered during emergencies as delicious, the reality is that people are happy to just have anything to eat,” Cohen said. Off the Grid doubled down on its pivot, seeing an opportunity to provide solace to people at a time of terrible tragedy. Off the Grid worked with its restaurant partners to scale up food delivery to frontline workers and victims during the pandemic and wildfire season last year. Suddenly, delivered meals were the only means for restaurants to connect to their communities, and the frontlines were no longer in the foothills where the fires were, but everywhere all the time. Those first trials were accelerated dramatically in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across California and the rest of the world. “ got an understanding of the market landscape in emergency response,” he said. Those 2017 fires were the first time the company forayed into helping first responders and victims, and Off the Grid along with its restauranteurs supplied an estimated 20,000 people with meals that year. Could Off the Grid connect the dots by having local restauranteurs cook meals while Off the Grid supplied the logistics to get them to the frontlines?
He noted that MREs are almost universally bland, and that the meals are typically ordered in bulk from outside the state. “For a long time in emergency response, people thought about food as calories, not necessarily about allowing local food businesses to sustain themselves,” he said. Frontline firefighters, operating at times in remote areas of the state, were often forced to eat what the military dubs MREs, or Meals Ready-to-Eat.Ĭohen and his team saw an opportunity. The first inklings of a change for the company started back in 2017, when wildfires like those in Sonoma and Napa swept across California. Well, we do live in different times, don’t we? “ built my career on the idea that food is a source of comfort at all different times,” Cohen said. Over the years, the festivals grew to extreme popularity (I remember more than once trying to go and realizing that others have way more patience to wait in line than I do), and Off the Grid itself increasingly expanded into catering for events. Off the Grid’s food festival in Fort Mason, San Francisco.