It’s fairly commonplace for a restaurant chain to select charitable organizations to support, while also encouraging its customers to support it as well.
For Ohio-based Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, a mid-sized regional chain, it found GiftAMeal to be the perfect match.
“We’re a regional chain about 128 units, but we’re spread across 12 states. We’re not an industry giant, but we’re big enough,” explained Dan Sokolik, vice president of marketing at Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken. “Trying to do local initiatives with local charities becomes somewhat challenging at the scale that we are, but yet we’re not big enough that it makes total sense for us to align with a national organization or charity.”
But when the chain learned about the GiftAMeal program, it found a national organization where the dollars raised goes right back to the local communities where Lee’s operates.
Customers at Lee’s can access the GiftAMeal app, take a picture, and with every photograph taken and submitted, “that equates into one meal being donated to their local food bank,” Sokolik said.
“Those dollars flow back into exactly where that customer. It’s not just some big rolled up donation being spit back up in many ways across the area,” said Sokolik. “They literally are able to calculate, based on the customer responses, where that activity came from and make those contributions back into the local market.”
The donations made to these food banks are not actual meals from Lee’s, but rather a monetary amount that is roughly equal to that of what one meal would cost.
“In a lot of cases, (food bank managers) almost prefer cash donations versus actual perishable items. They can go out and buy in that bulk, especially if they can work with food manufacturers. By their calculations, they are able to determine what their cost is to provide a nutritious meal for a family or per person basis. That’s how the donations are calculated based off their estimated cost,” Sokolik said.
Sometimes the customers will take pictures of their food at Lee’s, while others will take pictures of themselves, or themselves with their food.
“Some get really creative and have fun with it,” he added.
And those pictures not only help the recipients of the GiftAMeal program, they also good for Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken’s marketing efforts.
“Some of them take some really great photos, and we like to show off our own food and/or their smiling faces as well,” he said.
