A Wall Street trader turned warrior for food justice, Sam Polk and his Los Angeles-based team at the pioneering social enterprise Everytable have been quietly creating a revolutionary model: healthy nutritious food available for lower prices in underserved communities, subsidized by higher prices in more affluent communities. I caught up with him recently to find out more.
Afdhel Aziz: Sam, why did you decide to pivot from the non-profit world and create a social enterprise with Everytable?
Sam Polk: What I learned about the nonprofit world is that you have some of the most inspiring, amazing, selfless, talented and skilled people working in the sector and that the structure of the sector is basically designed for all of those talented people to not really make a huge difference. Nonprofits have been set up to be great tax shelters for wealthy people, but they haven't been set up to make good ideas scale, and that's because you have to spend a lot of your time raising money from wealthy individuals.
A lot of that money that you raise comes with restrictions that are more tied to what's good for the individuals as opposed to what's good for the organization. And so what happens is that you have a million people who start a nonprofit, but very few people actually succeed in scaling that nonprofit to something sustainable and longterm and systems-changing. And so, I was frustrated with how unnecessarily difficult the nonprofit structure was and looking for something where if I was going to put my everything into it, that it had a chance to really, manifest into a big world-changing thing.
Aziz: Where did the idea for Everytable and its pricing model come from?
Polk: Where it really did come from is basically the two worlds that I was shuttling between. At the time my family lived in Westwood and living a busy life, and when needed to go out and get food for dinner, we would go to Tender Greens or Sweetgreen and it ended up costing us a ton. It always seemed preposterous to me that we were paying $15 for a salad. And at the same time, I was going to work in South Los Angeles, a neighborhood where per capita income is $13,000 a year. So forget about $15, it had to be priced at $5 for it to be sustainable for people making $19,000 a year, and understanding how that translates to a daily food budget was humbling.
Aziz: One of the coolest innovations I’ve seen in Everytable stores the best is the "Pay it forward" wall where people can pay for someone else’s meal in advance. How’s that going?
Polk: We finally found a way for people who were supportive of Everytable across the country to really get involved–we had a woman in Ohio send us a check for one meal a day for somebody for the entire next year. You see this beautiful system in place where people come in, they may be experiencing homelessness, they may be out of a job and they walk to the wall, they grab the post-it note and then they just get in line like anybody else and use it as cash. It's as respectful and inclusive as it could possibly be.
Aziz: That's amazing. You've just opened your sixth store in Compton, Los Angeles. What is your vision for how Everytable can scale?
Polk: The real money in the food business where you have businesses not valued at a billion, but 10 or 100 billion–like McDonald's and Taco Bell who have figured out how to profitably sell food at $5 or $6. Because that's what allows you to go into every single market in the country.
We have our sights set on McDonald's/Subway scale. So to me, that means 10,000 to 30,000 locations. And for us, I think that's going to involve franchising and directing a large part of our franchise efforts towards the entrepreneurs of color from underserved communities. So we're really excited about that lever of potentially using Everytable's food to push against the structural inequality, but also our business model to create true economic empowerment and equity ownership over the long term.
Really it's the people in the kitchen and the stores that are the core of this business and I hope when you go into our stores you see this incredible level of hospitality, and also the quality of the food which is something that we work so hard at. There's a lot of people's hands who are involved in that process, so all the credit goes to them.
Aziz: That's great Sam. Finally, what advice do you have for other social entrepreneurs?
Polk: The thing about becoming an entrepreneur is realizing that all of these institutions that we have come to understand as the given fabric of the world were just created by people who had an idea and then applied themselves to manifesting that idea in the world. And it's very hard, but it's also very doable and as far as I'm concerned, that's the most satisfying thing that you can do, which is to put yourself into something that impacts the world in a positive way.
