In Food On Demand’s home city of Minneapolis, this endless year has included another dimension of stress beyond the pandemic. Restaurants have felt this more than most in the business community, and sometimes words don’t capture what it’s been like on a human level.
Minutes after receiving an email about vaccine slots that were filling fast as I clicked through with shaky hands, I was in my car on my way to the Black Walnut Bakery in Uptown to interview owner Sarah Botcher about having her first full day off in months and how she brought her brand-new business through to the other side of … everything. I’m an emotional guy, so take this with a grain, but these kinds of conversations ain't like they used to be: They’re more meaningful.
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Botcher wasn’t kidding about the difficulties of finding skilled labor. Five minutes after arriving, my hands were washed and I was folding freshly cut pastry and being politely told to move quickly lest the layers start breaking down.
Once they were chilling, we moved to the patio with masks off. Two men spoke a different language while eating breakfast behind us. Sarah chatted with an especially relaxed regular to our left who had his coffee, a roll and the Times. At the other end were a group of young, fashionable ladies laughing—and it was the most normalcy I’d felt in over a year.
Botcher and I covered everything from keeping the bankers at bay to not burning out her staff, making the hard decision to stop supplying other businesses to focus on her own clientele and not looking for new real estate, but instead focusing on everything here and now for the foreseeable future. Chasing growth isn’t always the right decision. Sometimes it’s chasing sanity and just living.
— Tom Kaiser, Editor
[email protected]
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Building your Off-Premises Tech Stack Sessions Online
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All the individual sessions from our latest webinar event are now online. If you missed the March event, head to the Tech Stack page to get keen insights into the tools you need to wrangle modern off-premises operations. |
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