How community partnerships opened the door for this Black-owned business to thrive
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2.5 million
Number of people City Fresh feeds homemade meals to annually, delivering to homebound seniors, schools, after-school programs, childcare centers and adult day centers throughout Eastern Massachusetts.
While some of the problems we face today are
indeed challenging, talk to Sheldon Lloyd, CEO of Boston’s City Fresh, and you’ll leave with a sense that there is an answer, one his company and local companies like his have been espousing for years: community feeding community.
“Business-to-business relationships can save this country,” says Lloyd. “We’re too focused on looking at our economy, communities, and relationships from a big business perspective, when in fact, building relationships on a community level solves so many of the problems we’re currently facing.”
City Fresh is a vibrant example of Llyod’s relationally driven perspective on business. As a Black-owned company serving Boston’s historically underserved populations the healthier food and economic opportunities it has lacked for decades, City Fresh is at the forefront of a movement to bring social justice and opportunity to its community.
City Fresh is employee-owned — of which 98 percent are people of color — thereby providing wealth-building opportunities to the neighborhood. For 25 years, it has focused on providing homebound seniors, seniors in assisted living, and children in charter schools, parochial schools, after-school programs, and summer programs homemade, healthy meals.
The food itself reflects City Fresh’s diversity, with a menu that includes a variety of ethnic influences — from Asian and Vietnamese flavors to Portuguese/Cape Verdean influences to Caribbean and classic American dishes — all with vegetarian and allergy-sensitive options to boot. This is far from standard, institutionalized food. City Fresh is dynamic, just like the neighborhoods they represent. As Llyod puts it, there’s simply “no one else who does what we do.”
Wherever possible, City Fresh uses local partners to source its food, labor, and capital needs, even if that means eschewing the traditional big business models. For example, when City Fresh went looking for investment capital for its new 18,000-square-foot facility in Roxbury, a partnership with South Shore Bank emerged, taking many by surprise, including Lloyd himself.
“My kids, and my colleagues’ kids, are in BPS,” says Lloyd. “It’s our community mission that keeps me going, not my monthly earnings report. There’s so much more here, and that makes us so much more. We’re hoping to inspire BPS to provide this community healthier food.”
Looking to the future, finishing construction on the new City Fresh building will be instrumental to the further success of Lloyd’s mission to bring healthy food and economic opportunity to the community. For its part, South Shore Bank remains committed to supporting City Fresh to the completion of the building, and beyond. It’s a success story in the making made possible by the local business-to-business relationships Lloyd champions.
It takes a village and people need to know these stories. It is possible to make money, have a profitable business, share the wealth, and improve performance. It’s all about the community.”
– Sheldon Lloyd,
CEO of Boston’s City Fresh
"South Shore Bank not only gave us the best proposal, but they also made it clear they wanted to build a long-lasting partnership,” recalls Lloyd. “They made a competitive offer that set the bar for all other institutions to compete with.”
Like City Fresh, South Shore Bank prides itself on partnering with small and medium-sized businesses in the community. According to Stephen DiPrete, chief commercial banking officer at South Shore Bank, the City Fresh proposal took a lot of adaptation, while also combining multiple avenues of financing for the final package. It was evidence of how much South Shore wanted to do business with City Fresh.
For Lloyd, City Fresh’s contract with BPS feels like the beginning of something larger. His company’s agile business model allows it to successfully scale to the number of meals needed. It was able to survive a pandemic where several other food catering companies — many of them multi-state or multinational — could not. Keeping the business powered by and geared toward the community served City Fresh well.
Its new building, financed by a package put together by South Shore Bank that blended private funding with the New Markets Tax Credit, will further City Fresh’s mandate of serving healthy food to the Boston community. But Lloyd’s mission, and by extension, the mission of City Fresh, goes beyond business expansion.
“Employing locally, feeding locally, purchasing from smaller and local companies — no one is doing what we’re doing,” says Lloyd. “It takes a village and people need to know these stories. It is possible to make money, have a profitable business, share the wealth, and improve performance. It’s all about the community.”
For more information on how business-to-business opportunities are shaping Boston’s future, visit www.southshorebank.com/business.
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For a businessperson of color, South Shore Bank’s desire to work with Lloyd’s company felt refreshing. Too often, Lloyd says Black-owned businesses experience barriers that other businesses don’t. But community partnerships, like the one between City Fresh and South Shore Bank, can be game-changing. When City Fresh won a recent contract to bring students in Boston Public Schools healthier meals, it felt like a proof of concept because often, minority-owned businesses are left out of bidding for city contracts. The three-year $17 million contract was City Fresh’s largest high-profile contract to date.