The pandemic resulted in an instant shutdown of many businesses. The non-essential food industry, in particular, received a significant hit, as most of the businesses had to remain shut for weeks or months. Among various other types of businesses in the food industry, restaurants had to endure huge losses.
Restaurants had to remain shut for the initial few weeks of the pandemic. Then various states started staged reopening of those restaurants. With too many restrictions in place, it was hard for most of the restaurants to cover losses incurred during the first few weeks of the pandemic.
Even after reopening, most restaurants and eateries had to work in a limited capacity to comply with their respective state laws, which meant overall decreased attendance.
With most of the regular customers of restaurants choosing to stay at home and cook meals rather than going out, most of the supermarkets experienced a significant boost in sales. People started purchasing food items and toiletries quite rapidly, which resulted in a dramatic rise in demand.
This overall scenario resulted in significant growth in sales of frozen foods and pre-cooked meals. Keeping these demands into consideration, most of the supermarkets had to stock up these in-demand food items.
The story was no different for HEB supermarkets. They were more than happy to meet rising demands, but they also took notice of restaurants that suffered losses due to the pandemic.
A brief history of HEB supermarkets
HEB supermarkets form a large chain of supermarkets, whose headquarter is located in San Antonio. This chain of restaurants has spread to 340 locations throughout Texas and Northern Mexico. This chain of supermarkets started in 1905 when Florence Butt used her $60 of life savings to open a storefront in a small town of Texas.
This business opened its first supermarket after years of consistent hard work in 1942. This supermarket was named HEB.
This business kept up with steady growth over the decades. In 1984, they started a food bank program, which dealt with the donation of unsold, salvageable foods across different market areas.
In 2020, it was HEB that took initiative to help restaurants in the state by providing them with food selling options to help their finances.
Packaging foods for local restaurants
Even though HEB continued to see rising growth in their business, they didn’t forget about the troubles their fellow in the restaurant industry were experiencing. So they reached out to those businesses and offered partnerships to help them during these testing times. They asked those restaurants to prepare foods, which the HEB would package and sell to the customers.
The best thing about this partnership was that they offered those restaurants 100% of the profit.
Their method included packaging of those foods in carded packaging, displaying them in coolers or other display cases with complete instructions about how to make the food items ready to eat, and also notifying customers about the source businesses preparing those foods.
HEB business, in this entire scenario, is not just to package foods, but it has been to help struggling businesses to prevent them from going down. This approach also sets an example of how to earn profits by helping others and build a more cooperative environment.
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