GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — For weeks, we’ve been encouraging you to order takeout on Tuesdays to help support local restaurants.
Now, there’s an even easier way to do that by simply picking it up at your local participating SpartanNash grocery store.
We went to the Family Fare in Grandville to speak with Christina Post from Anna’s House to learn more.
"We’ve been closed for six weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Post said. “It really was heartbreaking for us to have to shut down our restaurants for that long, and when SpartanNash approached us, we were given the opportunity to finally open our doors for takeout in addition to the grocery stores.”
SpartanNash’s Meredith Gremel gave us a status report on how things have progressed since launching the new program last week.
“We launched this on Friday, and we have eight restaurants participating in the partnership right now, and they're distributing their products into our 25 stores,” Gremel said. “So that's select D&W Fresh Markets, Forest Hills Foods, Family Fares and Ada Fresh Markets.
“The cool thing about it is just to be able to create this opportunity for families to have an easy and unique cuisine at home. We've got everything from German-Bavarian to Cuban to the Americana gastropub to iconic comfort foods, like all kinds of cool mac and cheese, ribs and Anna's even has a meatloaf breakfast meatloaf.”
If this past weekend was any indication, the partnership has been a huge success, with restaurants making multiple trips to their grocery stores to re-stock shelves that have already been cleared by hungry shoppers.
“We’ve done double deliveries almost every single day since Thursday,” Post said. ”I'm bringing a huge delivery in the morning, and then I get a call that says we need more. (It’s) allowed me to give hours back to people who were at home just waiting desperately to come back to work."
Getting food ready to sell at a grocery store instead of a restaurant is a much different task than restaurants are accustomed to with ingredients, health and other required labeling.
“We’re used to putting our food on a plate and delivering it with a smile,” Post said. “So this is a very different way of bringing our food to the community. But SpartanNash has been really great in offering a step-by-step process of how to package food and offered a lot of great guidelines. So that's been really helpful for us.
If you want to find out which grocery stores are taking part and which restaurants are offering food in those stores, visit spartannash.com/restaurant-meals-to-go. And the next time you want to help support a local restaurant, it can be as easy as a trip to the grocery store.