Since I founded D’Artagnan 35 years ago, our culture has been built on an ‘all for one, one for all’ mentality. With this as our guiding principle, we’ve weathered many storms and I know it will get us through the current crisis our industry is facing.
With the abrupt closure of restaurants, our industry was turned upside down overnight –our brothers and sisters who own and work in restaurants need our help now more than ever. Times like these show our interconnectedness – without restaurants, purveyors like us need to reinvent ourselves to survive. Without purveyors, farmers and processors cannot survive. Without farmers, nobody can survive. That’s why as an industry, we need to come together and support each other – by doing so, I believe we’ll come back even stronger than before.
As a food supplier critical to our industry’s infrastructure, it is our obligation and our cause to supply quality food to the public, especially when grocery stores are running low on essentials like chicken. That’s why we at D’Artagnan are embracing our all-for-one mantra to bring food raised right to the American table when it is needed so much.
Given things are changing minute by minute, no day is the same right now. As restaurant sales – which normally account for 75% of our business – have halted, we have had to retrofit our business model to address the growing demand from our retail partners to keep shelves stocked and to fulfill online orders, which have increased significantly over the last few weeks. Every single one of our employees has risen to the occasion to meet the new demands with a shared sense of camaraderie – it has been so inspiring to witness.
We want to expand this sense of camaraderie beyond our walls, so we are looking at new ways we can innovate to be even more helpful. We are evaluating expanded delivery options, working closely with farms and purveyors on production, distribution and everything else we can possibly do to help everyone, especially those in restaurants.
Will you join us as we work to support our restaurant colleagues in need and protect our supply chain? Please sign the petition Save America’s Restaurants Petition, directed to the nation’s governors, mayors and legislator to take action to save restaurants. I’ve also started a Petition to Save the Food Supply Chain, directed to the President. If we support each other, will get through this together – because now more than ever it’s ‘all for one, and one for all!’
