interviews
EAT OFFBEAT
by Manal Kahi
June 15, 2019
This interview with Manal Kahi, co-founder and CEO of EAT OFFBEAT, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
EAT OFFBEAT is a New York City based catering company that works exclusively with refugees.
How did you get started on this work? I know the crux of the business is in hiring refugees, are there particular guidelines about who qualifies as a refugee?
Manal: We're a catering company. We deliver authentic meals that are entirely conceived, prepared, and delivered by refugees here in New York City. Basically the model is we hire talented refugees who are looking to be in the food industry.
They happen to be with the UNHCR, they happen to be refugees by status – but they are chefs by nature.
We train them, for those who haven't had a professional culinary training or haven't had experience working in profession kitchens – we train them so they become profession chefs, we help them scale their recipes and then we deliver their dishes. It's the way they make it at home but they prepare it at our commercial kitchen and we deliver that to mostly offices and private parties or events all over New York City.
image via EAT OFFBEAT
Does hiring a refugee have any complications or benefits?
Manal: Complications? Not necessarily. They are usually referred to us by the IRC, the International Rescue Committee, and maybe that's a good place to answer your question of how we decide they're refugees.
We have a partnership with the IRC, which is one of nine resettlement agencies in the U.S. They help refugees. They help them even before coming here, they provide assistance to refugees filing for refugee status back home.
And once someone is approved they go through the very lengthy security process. They get to the U.S. and the IRC is mandated by the government to assist them in the settlement process. That includes picking them up at the airport, finding accommodations. Part of the assistance they provide is also finding jobs or employment and this is where we come in. Whenever we're hiring they send us candidates who are looking for a job who are recently resettled or who simply just want to be in the food industry. And that's how we hire.
So to answer your question on definition of who is a refugee for us, it's really whoever gets referred to us by the IRC.
Are you hiring full-time or part-time?
Manal: There's a good mix of both. It's a blend. Anyone who's a chef, who has items on the menu, who is contributing to the menu, that's a full-time position, because we need that chef to be at the kitchen whenever we get an order. We have a few positions that are more part-time.
How many people are you working with at the moment?
Manal: We're close to thirty people day to day.
Wow.
Manal: And that includes every function. That's chefs, sous chefs, delivery operators, customer service, everything all together. And it's a mix of refugees but also a couple of Americans. Especially on administrative functions.
Are you looking to expand beyond New York City?
Manal: Not necessarily and definitely not right now. We would never say "Never", that might happen an some point but for now our focus is really on New York City alone.
Are you set up as a for-profit business or a 501c3?
Manal: We are a for-profit business.
Do you feel like you're mission driven?
Manal: We are definitely mission driven. Definitely heavily mission driven. It's what guides us, it's what defines us, and it's part of who we are. At the same time we see ourselves as a food company first, we are definitely food centric, we're people centric, and the mission is very heavy. But it's very important that we are making money because that's the only way we can actually achieve our mission and keep hiring people and keep paying them decent wages.
Business is super important but for us it doesn't makes sense unless there is the social mission part attached.
Can you tell me a little bit about your own background?
Manal: I'm originally from Lebanon. I came here as a graduate student in 2013. My background was in environmental management. My goal was to go a bit more into international climate affairs. I was working on climate affairs in the Middle East and I wanted to go international. That's part of why I chose to come to New York, to be close to the U.N., multi-national institutions or organizations. And then when I came here, I was a bit disappointed with hummus in grocery stores –
I heard.
Manal: So that's really what sparked the idea initially. I started making my own. I got my grandmothers recipe and when that became successful here we thought why not commercialize it.
The first step was the hummus, the next step was...
Manal: Exactly the first step was the hummus and clearly the idea was not just make hummus and sell it, it was initially to have it made by refugees here who were being resettled here in New York City who wanted to share their hummus recipes with the rest of New York and commercialize that. That was really the idea early on. Then after that we went to studying the market, looking at the idea and we thought it was much better to go global. We though why not open it to any refugees coming from all over the world and discover these recipes that, just like hummus, are so much better when their homemade or made by someone who knows how it should taste.
We hire based on talent and passion for food regardless of where people come from, but so far it's been very diverse.
Do you think that it's hard for refugees to find work placement?
Manal: From what I see, my own personal opinion, it's different when you're an immigrant versus when you're a refugee. The only difference is, mainly when you're an immigrant you made the choice yourself, so very often you would have taken English classes, you made the choice as to where to go and when to go and why to go. But when you're here as a refugee very often you actually had to.
And why that makes it a bit harder is because when you come as an immigrant, when it's you're own choice, you may have come as a student, you have a bit more leeway and a bit more time to give it more consideration and decide whether you're going to go and what you're going to do exactly. Whereas if you come as refugee very often you just have to flee and you have to make it work with whatever.
I wouldn't say it's extremely hard to find a job. Jobs are available. It's similar to anyone who's looking for a job. It is definitely much harder to find a job that is a decent wage and a good job that makes you proud and that brings your dignity back – because very often you don't have transferable skills, you probably don't speak the language, so if you had training as an accountant before coming here it's much much harder to find a job as an accountant than to find a job at something else you're not necessarily passionate about.
Is there anything you've learned in the process of working with refugees about the refugee process?
Manal: One thing we've learned is that simply by providing a work environment and an atmosphere where people form a community, and they help each other even indirectly by being part of that kitchen and part of that community, people start to integrate and adjust and get adapted to their new lives much easier than when they're isolated and do not have a supportive community around them.
I see it happening in our kitchen.
I see a very high level of resilience that I think is notable and particular. All of our chefs, you can just see it, they're ready to do whatever it takes to succeed and they're very committed to the work they are doing. They are also very adaptable. Whenever we have a problem, something going wrong, everyone is very involved in the work and passionate about it and finds a solution. I think there's that added characteristic that is very common among everyone who's on our team.
What are your goals moving forward?
Manal: We have three goals. The first is to provide quality jobs to talented refugees who want to be in the food industry. The second is more about New Yorkers – it's about introducing New Yorkers to this menu and off the beaten path cuisines and somehow connect them, build bridges, between them eating our food at their homes or offices and us cooking in the kitchen. And the third ultimately is about changing the narrative around refugees, showcasing a different and more positive story.
What do you think the current narrative is around refugees?
Manal: That's a good question. Very often the narrative is around a more negative rhetoric, "they are stealing our jobs, not contributing to the economy, taking resources away." Or if it's positive it's all about how vulnerable the community is and how they always need charity, they always need help. Those are two concepts we are trying to change or at least provide one example where it's not necessarily the case, and we really push our customers to shift perspectives a bit, change perspectives a bit. Because in our case we refugees, we immigrants, are actually helping New Yorkers discover something new. It's all about shifting the table on that.
We're a 'for profit' we're not a 'non-profit'. Part of that is to show our chefs are contributing to the economy. They are contributing to making a richer food scene here in New York. They're active contributors to the economy. They're adding value. They're bringing value. And that's the other thing we want to highlight. They're not relying on charity, they're not taking they are contributing, they're paying their taxes.
The narrative becomes less about pity and charity and more about contribution and resilience.
Manal: Exactly!
Seeing people for who they are and what they have to bring rather than the status they came with.
image via EAT OFFBEAT
interviews
Impact Investment For The Circular Economy
by Rob Kaplan
January 31, 2019
Rob Kaplan is Founder and CEO of Circulate Capital, an impact-focused investment management firm dedicated to financing innovation, companies, and infrastructure that prevent the flow of plastic waste into the world's ocean while advancing the circular economy.
How do you define a circular economy?
I think a circular economy is one where commodities and resources are managed in perpetuity. So that there is no waste, but instead it's a resource for future innovation and product manufacturing.
In transitioning from a linear system to a circular one – who becomes responsible for the end of life? Especially in a time where goods are globally dispersed.
Well, I think the answer is that everybody's responsible. There's no single entity that is responsible for how it's managed at the end of its life, in my opinion. That's why this is a systems challenge that requires a systems solution.
Part of the challenge you're noting is the aspiration of a circular economy with the reality of where waste exists today. Because, circular economy in many ways is an aspirational concept. Especially within consumable products. It doesn't really exist. As we look to invest in companies that can prevent plastic pollution and instead drive towards more circular opportunities, it is a matter of degree. It's not, we'll get there tomorrow in that perfect ideal. It's more about, we've got a lot of waste that's not being managed appropriately. How do we improve that in a way that can create value for those communities? And also prevent the pollution at the same time.
What do some of those solutions look like in practice for you and the companies you work with?
We've been looking at how to invest in South and Southeast Asia for the last couple years. I'd say most of the opportunity that’s "shovel ready" today is in the waste and recycling sector. They are usually startup recycling companies that are generally the first line of formality. Where they're buying materials from waste pickers as well as municipalities in some cases. And then adding some kind of value to it. We also see a number of recycling facilities. They're a little bit further downstream from the collection aggregation. We have started to see a little bit of reusable and returnable systems, but they're in a very early stage at this time.
When you work with a large multi-national company, such as PepsiCo or Coca-Cola, what does their commitment to this process look like?
They have two different levels of commitment. The first is they are committing to improve their own operations and supply chains. Almost all of our investors have direct commitments about what they're doing to increase the amount of recycled materials they use in packaging and design for recyclability. Then, they are also committing capital to our strategy to allow us to invest in companies that can increase the amount of recycled material available for their use and the use of others.
They are also providing expertise and resources, and network. They are providing essential off-take and the ability to buy the material after it's collected and sorted. That's a big part of the challenge. The market that's available to buy this material. Needing that kind of surety of off-take.
We’ve discussed circular economies from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. Science, academia, advocacy. You approach it as a business. Why is your work a necessary part of the puzzle?
The particular slice of the problem we are looking at is plastic pollution in Southeast Asia. We quickly realized it was going to take many billions of dollars of capital to build the infrastructure required to really stop the flow of plastic leaking into the environment and the ocean. We started to look at where would that capital come from? And we realized that it's not going to come from necessarily consumers or companies, but really, institutional investors that are financing the future of infrastructure in Asia. The only way to get those folks involved in this space is to show them that it's an investable marketplace. That there is a track record. That there is a pipeline of opportunity. And that you can make money doing this. We want to demonstrate that investing in waste recycling is as boring as investing in roads and bridges, for which there is a lot of capital allocated.
Our approach to this was “How do you turn this from a waste stream and a cost center into a profit center as a way to unlock that capital?”
When you say infrastructure, are you talking landfills, incinerators? What is that infrastructure?
Our focus is certainly on the recycling and reuse side. I think there is a reality that they need to have improved landfills in Southeast Asia too. But we're not particularly able or interested in financing landfills and incinerators are out of our scope.
Has the China recycling ban affected your day to day?
Oh yeah. I mean National Sword basically turned the entire recycling industry upside down globally. In the markets that we're particularly focused on, they were exporting waste to China too. They hadn't invested in their own domestic processing. That has caused big problems for them and has created great opportunities for investors, who are trying to build those companies within those countries, under those infrastructure projects.
I think most of the countries we're working in in Southeast Asia have also started to follow China's lead and stop accepting imported waste. The US and Europe are not contributing as much to ocean plastic these days as we used to. Because the exporting markets have dried up.
I think there's probably a shifting in the future where more of that will go to Africa, right? Because they haven't started those bans. But most of Southeast Asia has already either halted imports or is talking about halting imports.
Does all of this help move the agenda of circular economies further?
Absolutely. It was so cheap. No one had any incentive to invest in domestic circular economy opportunities because if you were in Los Angeles it was cheaper to ship a container of waste to China than it was to Chicago.
That's crazy.
One important point that I've been trying to communicate lately is that there is no silver bullet for these solutions. It's incredibly complex. People really look for elegant, simplified solutions. But a circular economy is complex. We're not going to be able to reduce our way out of this problem just like we're not going to be able to recycle our way out of this problem. You need both and many more solutions. I worry about absolutists that are trying to push agendas rather than really trying to drive environmental progress.
Our approach is very much, how do we deploy capital as much and as quickly as possible to stop this pollution and make triple bottom line in the process of doing it? Rather than, you know, any political perspective or point of view, it's really just the view of the investor that we're looking to bring to the conversation.
All or nothing doesn’t work here.
Yeah. It's really complex. How can anyone say that there's a single solution to something? If it were that easy, we would have figured it out already. And I think we're also starting to see, because of the topic getting so hot and everyone wanting a piece of it, they're all saying, “Well, what's my contribution?"
Right.
My contribution is activism. My contribution is lobbying or my contribution is X, Y, and Z. And so they're all sort of piling on without a really clear theory of change about where they think they're trying to drive the progress.
Has the re-upping of investment from petrochemical companies into the production of plastic affected your work?
Yeah. One of the interesting things about plastics and circular economies is you actually want that feed stock, right? If you start removing feed stock opportunities, like PET plastic, which is what most beverage bottles are made of, for example, that's really problematic from a circular economy and recycling perspective because PET is the most recyclable plastic that we have today. You'd want to see more of that recyclable material out there. Right now it's cheaper to make plastic out of petroleum or natural gas in the US. It could be cheap to make it out of old plastics. That's where I think the big unlock towards the circular economy comes in. How do you tap into those market forces of building massive chemical facilities and use that as your off take for recyclables? That's the opportunity to change the game and that's your supply and your demand.
Are you optimistic that that will start happening?
I think the petrochemical industry is starting to show that they're really interested in that idea. I think it's really complex and hard to do. There's a lot of barriers. But it's not a technology barrier necessarily.
Is it a political barrier?
It's not so much a political barrier, I think but... Why do you think it's a political barrier?
Because of the political and financial incentive to produce and frack natural gas. How do you switch where incentive lies?
Yeah. I think you're right there. Policy is a huge part of that. Especially in the US where natural gas is so cheap thanks to policy incentives and new technology. It's not so much the same thing in some of these emerging markets we're working in, which is where energy is very expensive and most of that additional capacity is coming online.