Taproot Catering is helping to eliminate food waste and school lunch debt

With the help of a meme and some leftover food from their catering business, Michael and Linda Fiala, owners of Taproot Catering, began offering pay-what-you-can lunches Tuesday through Thursday, with proceeds going to the Kent City Schools.

After graduating from Kent State University with a degree in biology, Michael Fiala decided he’d rather be a chef, so he enrolled at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He’s been a chef ever since.

In 2013, the couple started a full-time food truck, Roll Call Burgers and Fries, in Kent. But as the food truck grew in popularity, they saw the need for a commissary kitchen, so they bought Taproot Catering in 2018.

After acquiring Taproot Catering and running the business alongside their food truck, they soon learned that catering generated massive food waste.

“In the catering world, there’s lots of food waste, whether you’re producing a certain amount for whatever size crowd it is, and maybe some of the crowd doesn’t show up, or whatever,” Michael Fiala said. “But there’s also another aspect of the food waste, where you have to buy a whole case of something to get the better pricing, so you end up having a half a case of lettuce sitting on the shelf, or three flank steaks sitting on the shelf, just because you didn’t need them for that event.”

The Fialas began to devise a plan that would put to good use the excess food that the catering company produced.

“What I saw was the opportunity to take something that would either be wasted, or get lost in the freezer, or just has a limited shelf life – we thought about ways to turn that into some revenue. The whole thought process took about three days, and it probably just started off with me saying, ‘Hey, let’s open for lunch. Let’s offer one soup, one sandwich, one salad,’” Fiala said.

Because the cost of using excess food from a catering business is low, the Fialas decided to use a pay-what-you-can model to charge customers, with the funds beyond their cost of food being donated to the Kent City Schools.

“So, doing a little bit of research about the pay-what-you-can concept, it’s been tried before, but what is out there in the world, if you’re able to combine that with some charity aspect, it tends to make a lot more sense to a customer. This was like January of this year. And just thinking about New Year’s resolutions, I had seen a meme relating to coffee culture that said, ‘rather than pay for the person’s coffee in line behind you, stop at your local elementary school and pay $20 to pay off student lunch debt.’ So, I just sent a quick email to Kent City Schools to see if we could do this program and would we be able to get money to those that were having trouble paying for school lunches,” Fiala said. “They said, ‘Yeah, we can make that happen.’”

Kent City Schools Treasurer Debbie Krutz said there is state and federal funding that pays for breakfasts and lunches for students from low income families, but there are times that donations can be used to buy meals for students.

“There are families who do not qualify based on income, or they choose not to apply; they don’t qualify for a free meal,” Krutz said. “So those families, if the children use our meal service, they have to pay, but we do have a lunch debt policy. Sometimes it’s a matter of kids forgetting to bring their lunch money, or the families forgetting to send it in, so we do have a policy where students can charge, on account, some meal charges up to a certain amount, and these are the balances that Michael covers. So, we’re very appreciative of his project and thank him very much for thinking of the Kent City Schools and our families.”

Neighboring business owner, Mike Mistur at Bent Tree Coffee, as well as his customers, take advantage of having lunch at Taproot.

“Donating all the money is like a crazy great thing that he’s doing,” Mistur said. “It’s incredibly generous. It’s nice that you can choose to pay your own price, so different people can have access to food that they might not be able to afford from somewhere else, so it’s kinda nice for the community in that regard. From my perspective, it’s been super successful, and I’m super happy about that. Turning that into something that he can donate out, it’s kind of a genius move.”

The lunches are at Taproot Catering from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Tuesday-Thursday, at 313 N. Water St., and include a sandwich, a salad and an optional dessert.

“The sandwich and salad combination cost is $6, and then whatever above that $6 goes into the fund for the schools,” Fiala said. “We tell them, pay whatever you want, and then they’ll ask, ‘What are other people paying?’ We’ll suggest between $8 and $10. We have people come in that pay anywhere from $5 to $20 per sandwich.”

And sometimes, pay-what-you-can is $0.

“If someone came through the door and said, ‘I don’t have any money,’ we’d make them a sandwich and send them on their way,” Fiala said. “We don’t want to keep people out. We want to encourage those that can to pay a little bit more, so that those that can’t, and the kids that can’t eat in school, it’s a little bit easier for them.”