Matt Cohen with Off The Grid found a "win-win" solution when he found a way to save restaurants and provide emotional care through great food in disaster. It's time to throw out those MREs and support small businesses- Off The Grid is changing how to look at food in disaster response.
In the world of COVID-19 and beyond, it's time to look at innovative solutions that overcome traditional disaster norms. One of those is a double-hitter by addressing food as emotional care for survivors, as well as, saving small local restaurants during times of crisis.
Small restaurants are particularly vulnerable to disasters. Between supply chain rout interruptions lack of business from the local community, and staffing constraints- restaurants fail too often in disaster. Ironically, by focusing on the business continuity of restaurants, we also help survivors by providing delicious meals, made by culture of local cuisine. We know that great food, packed with nutrients can counteract the impact of emotional trauma of environmental chaos. Thus, if we focus on creating relationships with the local food community to build business continuity and use their resources to support survivors- we now save two groups. A win-win for emergency services.
Learn more about Off The Grid's mission and strategy to save local restaurants and provide emotional care to survivors by visiting Off The Grid
This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab.
Host: John Scardena (0s):
You've just entered the Disaster Tough Podcast, the place for emergency managers, first responders and humanitarians who want to get the job done. Stories, lessons and tips are provided by field experts. I'm your host to John Scardena, owner of Doberman Emergency Management and former federal emergency response official who's responded to some of the most extreme disasters. Disaster Tough is our mantra, it combines experience, training, and analytics in order to be successful at any stage within the disaster lifecycle, it means being a professional in emergency and disaster services, Doberman Emergency Management lives by this. If your organization needs to fill a gap, please contact us we can help. Contact info is in the show notes.
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Host: John Scardena (2m 84):
Welcome back to the show everybody it's your Host: John Scardena. I am so excited for this week. One year ago, roughly today we talked about business continuity. We talked about small businesses, and most importantly, we talked about restaurants and what they had to be doing in a response of a pandemic and all kinds of crazy disasters. You fast forward a year and I found the man that can answer a lot of our questions, his name is Matt Cohen, he leads off the grid and he's there to specifically help small restaurants get connected to big groups to be able to help people out in disasters, specifically those restaurants to be able to keep them going. It's really exciting to have him on, Matt welcome to the show.
Guest: Matt Cohen (2m 48s):
John, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Host: John Scardena (2m 50s):
I was checking you guys out over 900, in fact at 973,000 meals that you were able to help deliver last alone, which is pretty wild to think about. I know you're based out of there in San Francisco, you have food trucks and you guys saw this opportunity to respond. Now you're touching the emergency management world, tell us more about off the grid and kind of that idea that you guys that had and why did you get into the emergency management space?
Guest: Matt Cohen (3m 23s):
Yeah, so John our story started in the emergency management space in 2017. We really deeply believe in the idea of local food communities and how we can support local food communities. The best way to explain what we do for people who aren't familiar with our company is that we connect local food businesses, typically mobile businesses. So, food trucks, caters pop-ups, cottage food businesses, with opportunities to sell it in the public and we provide the spaces to be able to do that. So, it always seemed like there was this connection to emergency response, but you know quite honestly off the grid, it's been around since 2010. Quite honestly, like how you draw that connection between where we fit in and the emergency response space took us a little bit of time to figure out and so it kind of went from there.
Host: John Scardena (4m 25s):
Well, 2017 was definitely the year to jump in an emergency because like I think that was the first year we had four for type one events in response. We had hurricanes wildfires, a lot of groundbreaking stuff. Unfortunately, we don't want to ever want to be groundbreaking in emergency services.
Guest: Matt Cohen (4m 46s):
I mean, this is the fundamental conundrum, right? Like we want to be able to help. We want to be able to be prepared, but fundamentally we also don't want these things to happen. Right and so that's, that's also that mental shift has been something that our team has had to kind of work through as well.
Host: John Scardena (5m 5s):
Absolutely. The way I like to approach it is, you know, especially for those who are thinking about getting into the field or the people who are really passionate about emergency services, it's not doomsday prepping, great preparedness is making your life easier in response. It takes a crisis and it prevents it from becoming a disaster and what you're doing right now is you're saying, hey, for all those small restaurants, for all those restaurants out there who just need to get out there and help people, that's taking a crisis that could impact their business and allowing them to keep operating it, hence preventing a disaster for those people. Right? So, it's not so much like if or how, but it's about sustainability and be able to return to normal as fast as humanly possible right?
Guest: Matt Cohen (5m 55s):
Well, actually, so what we saw in 2017, because we were at that point only involved in more of a local response in Sonoma and Napa counties, and what we saw was like this amazing energy from the culinary community about wanting to jump in and support these farms and these communities that they work with all the time. Right. But what also became increasingly clear was like those efforts, which were relatively chaotic, those efforts were also relatively unsustainable. So, they could jump in for a few days, they could jump in for five days a week, they could get something donated from suppliers. But ultimately that began to run out over a period of the first seven days of the events and that's really where we began to see like, oh, there is this next step about what happens in terms of recovery, as people move towards stabilizing and they're interested in comfort, but long-term care as well.
Host: John Scardena (6m 57s):
Yeah. There's definitely the psychological side of it as well. We'll get into that in a little bit. But in terms of the organization, it sounds like a lot of support without a lot of organization and what off the grid is doing is providing that organization piece to it. Right. So, in my perspective, we always talk about response and recovery, but there is actually like this middle ground of, we know we're technically not in response anymore because we're not doing lifesaving, but we're definitely not in recovery yet. Maybe we can invent it today on the show, but there needs to be like this, it's not A and B it's B and C, and we've got to figure out what B is, right. Maybe B stands for business, I don't know business.
Guest: Matt Cohen (7m 49s):
Constantly. No, but like there is this middle space that happens where initially it's like people just need food, right. But then it goes past food and their entire life is disrupted and is going to be disrupted for Some time, and food can provide that connection to comfort in a way that really is empowering both to them. But also, I think a lot of people forget what the restaurants that are in those communities are also impacted as well. All of their normal customers, their routines, their habits, are disrupted and they might have come back for months or years. So, you know how to make that connection between the two is that the space that I think is really valuable and important.
Host: John Scardena (8m 37s):
So, okay. Not going to lie, I literally just got back from a family trip to Yosemite and if anybody's been into Yosemite National Park, there is a lot of driving, like an insane amount. Like they say, it's all three or four hours to the park, but then you don't realize that it's another, like two hours to get in the park. But anyway, so it was like so much driving yesterday. At the end of it, we're in the middle of nowhere and it's around dinner time. My two-year-old is super hungry. I'm with my parents, it's a crazy situation and I'm exhausted. We found this restaurant and go in there and I had like, it felt like it was the best steak I ever had. I think it was probably because I was tired, but it rejuvenated me. I felt like oh, I can drive another two hours tonight, it's totally fine. It changed all of our moods and we were happier. It comes back to like what you said, in fact, Matt and I talked that previously about the psychological impact of disaster and what food can do for that and overcoming like effects of PTSD. I just like want our listeners to hear, especially those emergency managers from your perspective, why should they focus on the culinary aspect, not just because that's where we always go to, there's an emotional side of emergency management, especially helping out with survivors. What are your thoughts on that?
Guest: Matt Cohen (10m 2s):
Yeah. I mean, John, I think you bring up a really important point that essentially not all calories are equal, right? I think there is an extreme sensitivity to wanting to provide safe food to those who are in need and obviously be able to meet the needs from a kind of scale place of uncertain amount of people that you need to serve. So, like typically the what kind of path to that is buying pretty commodity type food and serving it in a way that doesn't necessarily rely on refrigeration. It doesn't necessarily rely on kind of food safety needs, and mitigating food safety risks. I think that the point that OTG is trying to do when we are operating in this space is make it just as easy to work with a local restaurant or a local business, to be able to provide the meals to people in need, but actually be able to provide fresh local food that can then have this double bottom line impact to that restaurant in that community, farms in the community when we're doing deliveries and we're facilitating deliveries using local couriers, allow people to get back on their feet. It was really about that sense of like being able to provide delicious food that has all of these kinds of trickle-down additional impacts that are good for communities.
Host: John Scardena (11m 32s):
Man, there's so many layers of like good in that, which I don't know if that's a food pun or not. It's like seven layers of good, but you know let's like talk about the restaurant owner. You've just been impacted by a wildfire, your home's impacted and you got this business that technically can still operate, but you don't have any ways to get supply chain there. All of a sudden, they have supply chain talk about a stress relief and now they get to do what they love or at least get to do what they are used to doing, which is a big part of the psychological response in our recovery of a disaster, just returning to normal. So, you have that whole side of it and then they're serving the customer and seeing the customer feel relief and the customer being relieved, you know? From, again, that analogy of A, B, C, all those points down the line, I think helping out restaurants is a huge deal right now.
Guest: Matt Cohen (12m 33s):
If you take it from a restaurant perspective, the first time that most restaurants right now are thinking about how they can get involved in emergency response, is in the middle of an emergency. So, they're like, we want to get involved, we want to be able to help, but they're also like, how am I going to continue paying my people? Where's my food going to get paid. So, I think what we're trying to do, and this is the kind of ultimate space where OTG has landed is by onboarding them ahead of time, by giving them food, handling standards by pre-negotiated all of the pricing that fit with our contracts at the state level, or with non-NGOs of various places. All of a sudden what we enable them and empower them to be able to do is activate right.
Guest: Matt Cohen (13m 28s):
Which is exactly what they want to do and what they're most passionate about.
Host: John Scardena (13m 32s):
Okay. So, let me ask some questions then, because as a guy that has been out to plenty of disasters myself, all over the country, it's kind of works like this and at least my perspective and tell me how OTG, I like how you keep calling it OTG that's awesome, like the OG now. So, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints brings the food. Typically, the Salvation Army or the Baptist church, Southern Baptist Church cooks the food, Salvation Army/Red Cross gives food to survivor, right? So, you have all these commodities and that's kind of the standing operating procedure that happened after Katrina, because that was a crap shoot between everybody like literally trucks with food were showing up and they were just, nobody would use it because they didn't have those in place. How do you insert yourself into that equation?
Guest: Matt Cohen (14m 31s):
So, there's a few aspects to this, and I think we could talk about a COVID time and a non COVID time, right? So, let's just say during the COVID time, when everybody was sheltered and placed in individual hotels, the idea of being able to meet those food service needs required delivery to a great variety, different spaces. The logistics of that are actually really complicated to be able to do even at large hotel properties. So, what we have, what OTG is best at is the logistics of being able to connect those restaurants, be able to have some sense of control about cuisine type around, around dietary restrictions, labeling, and be able to actually safely transport it to hotel properties. Now that's during COVID right. When we get out of COVID and we get to more of a congregant feeding experience. Well, we're also able to do is use the aggregate amount of restaurants to scale up seamlessly so that the restaurants can continue to maintain their supply chains. Also, at the same time, deliver the meals either in bulk or packaged to be able to be used over an extended period of time so, this can fit into the logistics infrastructure of a salvation army for red cross doing a pickup and actually delivering those meals to the site, or we can help to facilitate that too. Yeah. What we want to do is ultimately just be the best partner that we can to those larger organizations that are involved.
Host: John Scardena (16m 8s):
Yeah. In fact, we've had Patrick Mcginn on here from the Salvation Army and he talked about the logistics of trying to deliver food to all, I think it was 120 hotels in the wildfires last year, and that had never been done before because they always do congregate shelters. All of a sudden, he was looking at it and the state basically said, Hey, can you do this? He said, I'll figure it out. You know, he didn't say this on the show because he's a good guy, but he was run ragged. I'm a personal friend of his, and he's a great friend of the show. I know he was just exhausted. So, like the idea of even releasing that burden a bit of just saying, like using local communities to know how to do this, there does come a question in my mind though, of like personal identifiable information.
Okay, we know they're survivors, not even the hotels knew they're survivors in there. How do you overcome the issue of, okay, we want to work with these communities to get food there, but we can't really let them know who's that for, how's that work out? Have you thought about that at all?
Guest: Matt Cohen (17m 14s):
Yeah, what we actually do it in a couple of different ways. With our logistics platform, what we're able to do is anonymize the information down to the bare minimum necessary in order to meet the delivery need. So, in a congregate site it's less necessary. It's just the amount of people that don't have a specific thing that you need. But when you're talking about a hotel environment or something like that, where names are necessary, but no other information needs to be there. We actually are able to deliver printed labels or labels that can be printed the restaurants so that it can make it to the right place and where it needs to go. If there's more sensitivity than that, we can actually put someone on the ground that can actually facilitate the delivery and limit the information sharing to the absolute minimum amount of people necessary. So, yeah, I mean, I think that what you don't want to do is put people's personal information at risk, obviously at a time when they're in crisis. You know, we've gone through and audited our processes and systems to absolutely eliminate the, or I guess minimize the amount of sharing of personal data at every step of the way.
Host: John Scardena (18m 28s):
Got it. Walk me through the process then let's say, I am, I don't know, an Indian food restaurant, one of my favorite restaurants, right. Just right down the street. I'm hearing that, you know, through the grapevine, I was another food pun, I'm very proud of myself for that. So, I'm hearing that doubt, a couple miles down the road, they're survivors from a disaster I want to help, or hey every year, we're at risk for a wildfire. I know there going to be survivors on the road, I want to be able to help as a restaurant. How does that process happen from completion? How do they actually get food into the hands of the survivor if they just want to help?
Guest: Matt Cohen (19m 13s):
I think for us, it actually starts ahead of time. I think here's a call to action for the emergency managers that are out there listening to this, which is if you know of restaurants that have done a great job working with you in the past, we'd love that connection. Please go to offthegrid.com. Please let them know about our website because we're onboarding them right now. So, what we're doing when we work with a restaurant is we're collecting their insurance information, their health certificate, making sure that they have safe food handling practices. We send them an onboarding process. That basically is a kind of a get started kit and an onboarding kit to our program.
Guest: Matt Cohen (19m 56s):
It, it allows them to understand how to print the necessary menus. It allows them to understand the sizing and the portioning that would be appropriate so that they can activate in the event that something happens in their region within a few counties away, whatever they're willing to do, that they can activate and jump in and help people. So really for us, the most important thing, just like that restaurant not wanting to get started with all the paperwork in the middle of an emergency for us. We want to get ahead too, and we're in the process of onboarding people right now.
Host: John Scardena (20m 35s):
Okay, your process includes both the supply chain route and actually working directly with the survivor in like, for example a congregate shelter, right? Yep. So, if I'm a restaurant owner or more importantly, if I'm a manager and I'm saying, okay, obviously I need to start thinking about food as an X factor in business continuity and I'm a local emergency manager at a County. I'm like, oh right, I should be including businesses. We always include businesses for critical infrastructure and for all kinds of different stuff. But what you're saying is we need to include those restaurants. If they are pairing with off the grid or pairing with that kind of mentality from an emergency management perspective, I guess my thoughts or my question would lead towards how does the emergency manager connect those dots between the two, and how does that cost share even happen? Are they getting paid from the county? You know, what is, what is the cost analysis there?
Guest: Matt Cohen (21m 40s):
Yeah. I think the conversation can start in a variety of different ways, but what off the grid, really what we found the value in as being the one point of contact to be able to then distribute the meal opportunities amongst a group of restaurants. If you happen to be in a particularly rural area to go out and find other restaurants that maybe are in your immediate area, but are in the adjacent areas to be able to give you a resiliency. So, the funding, if it's a county, typically that's getting into longer stage recovery. So maybe there's FEMA funding associated with that.
Guest: Matt Cohen (22m 20s):
And we're happy to talk about where the funding source for that could be, or it could be coming in our case from the state of California or from charitable organizations.
Host: John Scardena (22m 31s):
So basically, you're trying to get an MOU in place that if the restaurants involved, sorry, memorandum of understanding that of restaurants involved and they provide services, then the check comes from the government to resupply. You're not going to survivors for example, and saying, hey pay us $12.99 for your meal, right?
Guest: Matt Cohen (22m 54s):
Yes, that's exactly right. I think our kind of first principles are that emergency response for the restaurant should strengthen it rather than harm it. That it should be as easy and simple and delicious for someone who's impacted by an emergency to be able to get a meal. That's obviously free of charge. So, what we're trying to do is bridge the funding source with the logistics and the need in order to make it super easy for an emergency manager, to be able to say, this is exactly what I need, but not necessarily worry about how many restaurants it'll take to get to that name.
Host: John Scardena (23m 38s):
Okay I want to switch gears here for a second, because obviously it's always about the survivor, but now I'm thinking about that stake too much. So that's a problem. But in terms of emergency management, I've been out on disasters where the first couple of weeks out there, I eat one meal a day and I was working like 18 hours a day. I am definitely not as important as survivor, obviously, however, that support system that is required to sustain survivors, I do feel for those, you know, I feel for the wildland firefighters, especially who are at an incident command base for months fighting these fires, they don't do anything with survivors. Does off the grid do anything with that? Or is there MOU that you guys are looking to work directly with the responders, like how does that work?
Guest: Matt Cohen (24m 29s):
So typically, what we've done with, especially kind of more remote supportive firefighters has all been through kind of charitable pathways rather than MOU, is of course the exact same thing could work with an MOU. But typically, what's great about OTG is in those remote places, we can actually spend a food truck to those remote places and it can get supplements to what is normally there, or it can be something where we're stationing people and we're cycling food trucks through even bringing them in from out of state. I think there's a lot of flexibility there, but typically yeah, we'll bring the food to wherever the need is.
Host: John Scardena (25m 16s):
Yeah, so I just spent all last week with Urban Search and Rescue at the State Urban Search and Rescue 2021 training certification that just happened and a really incredible, I mean, true heroes, people who are going into pancakes buildings, that's not upon. That's actually what they call it, where, you know, we were laying on glass and rubble on my chest and the ceiling was on my back and we were helping out survivors inside buildings for the entire week. I would want to give every single resource I could to them so that they could do their job effectively, and it does take a toll and anything that you can do to like to release that toll on our responders so they can keep helping people. I mean, that's a big deal right off the grid aside. I mean, off the grid sounds like an amazing concept, but what we're actually talking about is food to increase resiliency. Actually, what I should say is food to create more tough people. Right, yeah, really cool concept.
Guest: Matt Cohen (26m 25s):
Yeah and I think, again from our perspective, I think maybe a lot of that hurdle has been around foodborne illness concern right. I think that there are ways to overcome that, that make a lot of sense and allow for breaking out of the environment of just the MRE, right. Or, a very limited food supply. So, I think they're interesting creative ways to overcome that. We're excited to just be having that conversation with people and be educating them about the different ways that that can happen.
Host: John Scardena (27m 5s):
That's a real concern. You saw our teams bring their own food with them because of that. They're so afraid of getting sick. So, if you're going to talk directly to them, what would you say?
Guest: Matt Cohen (27m 17s):
I mean, bottom line, there's not one single solution for any given problem, right? So, if you're out in a remote place and there's a small group of people, the needs associated with feeding that small group is very different than a much larger group where you might bring in more infrastructure. What I would say is it's a conversation where it's about what's the best thing to meet the need. Then we have a whole array of tools to be able to support that. Whether it's bringing in local food businesses, providing them with a truck themselves, bringing in local trucks, or being able to support by actually providing the assembly offsite and bringing it there and making sure it’s transported safely. There's like a whole bunch of ways to be able to make it happen. But it's really about the right process that aligns with health code standards as well.
Host: John Scardena (28m 15s):
Yeah. I mean, the pin debit really highlighted that, right, of like not all disasters are also created equal. Not all disasters are regional disasters, I'm really curious to see the numbers after all of this. I hope it's not as bad as I think it is, but FEMA has the stat that 40% of all small businesses do not recover after a disaster and 25% that do come back, fail within a year. We obviously know that restaurants are a big part of that. I mean, on average, you probably know this better than I do, but it takes about a year before even a small business, small restaurant, can become profitable so that first year is the scary year.
Guest: Matt Cohen (28m 60s):
Yep. The stat that is being thrown around right now in the Bay Area and I think it's probably relevant for the rest of the country as well, is that 50% of restaurants were put at financial risk of going out of business over the course of the of the pandemic. It'll take two years or more to recover financially, even if they get back up to the level of sort of business that they were doing pre-pandemic. So, in this environment, it has been totally destabilizing, these are the major employers and communities, and these are small businesses that are kind of the fabric of what make an individual place to feel special.
Host: John Scardena (29m 54s):
It sounds like you are intimately involved with these businesses and you're able to understand their pain points I got to ask, and this is kind of outside the realm. So, you can pass the buck on this one, if you want to. But all those stories that came out last year about the personal protection payment program, or something that the protection payment program and like Ruth Chris get. If you don't really follow the story, everybody listening in like what happened was, you had to be a small business and it had to be under a certain amount of money. I had all of these things, but then these huge restaurant chains were claiming franchises and they were getting the money and it like ate up a lot of the first round of money because the era to figure out how to go around it, do you agree with that? Because you're like, okay, they are franchises and they are people or where you're like, man, that could have really been much more effective. It went to other organizations. What was your take on that?
Guest: Matt Cohen (30m 53s):
I mean, I think that the kind of the outrage, as I understand it around PPP in particular was about well, capitalized companies. So, Ruth Chris publicly traded company, right? So well-capitalized company in the marketplace going and kind of extracting value from the program and putting other people's ability to take advantage of the program at risk. I think that what I can say is for restaurant in general, the PPP program has been moderately effective because what the PPP program does in order to get to forgiveness for restaurants is it requires them to maintain payroll.
But if you don't have customers coming in the door, what is the payroll going toward? Right. I think in the most recent legislation that went through, there's the Restaurant Recovery Act, which if your gross receipts are, I believe 30% lower than the previous year, there's an opportunity for a grant. It's targeted really mainly at small restaurants and small businesses. I think there's a second piece of the package that's really relevant. But I think where really the PPP kind of impact was really around, oh, well, I have employees I can keep them on, but where can they go by the way, what a great fit for this topic about allowing them to be able to continue working and be able to provide these kinds of services. So that's what we've done. I think, a year, the number that you used at the opening of the show, I think now we're in excess of 1.3 million meals that we provide in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose by operating these programs and supporting these restaurants.
Host: John Scardena (32m 55s):
Incredible. I mean, that's really incredible. Yeah. That's interesting take on the PPP and the fact that it sounds like there's been improvements to that. Interesting about that, I like hearing it from your perspective because everybody, I mean, you read these articles and you're like, okay, if you're going to talk about disaster response, I'm your guy. But hearing about this is really fascinating to think about. You talked earlier about preparing for the future, and we're all obviously all about preparing for the future, right? I'm going to look at it from like that preparing the business continuity plan. I'm a county emergency manager, or even for example, if I worked for a federal agency that required a business continuity plan, and we're working with the community around us, what would be your top three things that they should do now in order to be able to support those local businesses?
Guest: Matt Cohen (33m 53s):
I think that the first thing is really assessing scale of response and what exactly is weather, you know, tabletop, exercise, whatever. But like, what exactly is the emergency in order for us, if we were going to have a conversation in order for us to assess what is the order of magnitude of how many restaurants are needed to support a particular place? So, an example of this is we're preparing for different amounts of response in 39 counties all over state of California, not all of those 39 counties have the same demand. What we're trying to do is meet kind of the threshold that'll be able to respond to different orders of magnitude of response. Then there's a whole kind of secondary series of interesting conversations to be had about what I would love. My dream would be that there are predefined spaces where in the event of a certain level of an emergency that the local community can activate and turn on. Then the final one is about the kind of reality of the economics of the response and some understanding of an MOU. So that action can be taken and those restaurants can be activated.
Host: John Scardena (35m 18s):
Yeah, that sounds kind of on par with what we do with typing it out, type one, type two, type three. I would like to see something like that. If I was going to do a business continuity plan today, and government does these plans for different organizations and that's fine. But I would really like to see it also incident based because you look at a hurricane or tornado, your survivors are your survivors and the people that you're working with are directly impacted. But if you're in something like an active shooter, it's going to be the families and your survivor base has actually expanded now to people who are hyper aware that the world could be dangerous. Something happened to their kid or something could have happened to their kid and providing that. Again, going back to that Patrick Mcginn’s statement of emotional and spiritual care, man, sometimes eating food is pretty spiritual, right? It's an interesting thought process of incident type as well.
Guest: Matt Cohen (36m 23s):
No, I think to that point, I think the other thing about using local businesses is those businesses are reflective of local community values in a way that kind of larger entity that's just kind of preparing food as just a product maybe isn't considering, right? So, the kind of universe of diversity and equity and inclusion and having like a lens into that in emergency response is I think another area where this is a really cool opportunity to be able to serve those needs of a community that might be lower income, or coming from a particular demographic perspective.
Host: John Scardena (37m 15s):
Okay. That my mind is suspending with ideas right now to tell me a few things is unrealistic. So, we had two kids in the last two years, we're ballers in that way, but we had a really great community of like friends and family who like dropped off food or would make meals for us. Then, you know, depending on like the level of surgery, whether it's giving birth or something else, it would be amazing if, and as part of either your insurance or as part of an NGO outreach that said, Hey, if you're going to give birth, we're going to deliver one meal a day for the next six weeks, even like super localized like that.
I mean, you could start pairing this off to any level of disruption in your normal life. Now, having a kid is a wonderful disruption, but it is a disruption, right? Mom's on sleeping, dad's trying to help out like the whole deal. There's lots of different ways that she could pair this, whether you're an emergency manager or you're actually just trying to look at it for your family, you know, and just who orders food six weeks out. Right? Nobody does that. But if he did that from good food, I mean, might change some stuff too.
Guest: Matt Cohen (38m 32s):
No, I think actually there's an interesting connection here to data, because in the past, all of the steps that you described about the kind of acknowledgement that there's been an event in someone's life and an action being taken is that provides a variety and something that will feel comforting and delicious, that'll arrive directly to someone, all of those kinds of tools existed in separate places and they were hard to integrate together. But, the world that we're living in right now and the tools that we think about building on in terms of emergency response are all about integrating those things seamlessly together so that you can use really powerful data around be able to identify the people who have a particular need, be able to reach them through social media tools or through a variety of different kinds of mechanisms where there'll be at, qualify them and then seamlessly basically onboard them into a process that begins giving them comfort in a variety of different ways. That's actually literally what we did for our grocery program in San Jose, where we actually took the tools to amplify what was a traditional community groups and local government communications plan, and be able to qualify people and onboard them into the program that wouldn't have otherwise known about it.
Host: John Scardena (40m 20s):
Yeah, fascinating. Okay, if that's all true and you're moving and you're looking all this data, what is the data telling you about the future? What do you think is most important to focus on? And really for the people who are listening to this show, we're the guys writing the plans, we're the guys and girls writing the plan. What do they need to do? What are the next steps?
Guest: Matt Cohen (40m 44s):
So, I think one of the pain points that we've heard from a lot of people who are responsible for managing a disaster response and emergency response is that sometimes the data comes to them slowly. Oftentimes the data isn't necessarily actionable about the experience of what the people receiving care feel about that experience, and what we are really interested in being able to do is number one, provide as real-time data as we can about what's actually happening. As everyone knows situations change quickly on the ground and being adaptable is important, but also being able to connect that to a survivor response, that they can actually feel empowered to be able to have some control, but also some feedback around, yeah this was good, thank you for this. That message can go to the restaurant, but that message can also go the emergency response manager so that they are understanding about what's actually happening on the ground to the people they're trying to support. That's where we're trying to go in the future.
Host: John Scardena (42m 1s):
That's cool. Okay. I have to ask because I'm looking at the time here, we're starting to run out of time. Let's say, what's your final pitch? If you were going to talk to our community, I deal with guys look like the reality is we're already burned out, everybody's burned out. I actually, I'm doing great, but because I just went to Yosemite.
Guest: Matt Cohen (42m 22s):
I mean, you're burned out because of your two kids.
Host: John Scardena (42m 28s):
Avery energizes me, but like seriously, what's your pitch to us, you know off the grid is an amazing concept and you're reminding all of us a business continuity and restaurants can help out, you know not just the owners which we care a lot about, but we also care about the survivors, obviously. What's your pitch?
Guest: Matt Cohen (42m 51s):
I think bottom line, if the idea of allowing local restaurants to be able to meet your needs is attractive to you, but it feels overwhelming to think about how to even engage with that. I'd love to have a conversation with you, right? Because what we understand is, you can be uncompromising about meeting the demands when you're put in this situation to be responding to it and you can be uncompromising around delivering safe food to people, but we are aiming to be the solution for how they can take what seems like a complicated thing and make it simple. So that's the pitch and I think anecdotally, what we know is that by each successive event, that we're involved in, that we're building the trust of the community and hopefully that trust will precede us wherever we go.
Host: John Scardena (43m 54s):
That's a great pitch, 1.3 million meals are pretty good metrics picking up data. Congratulations to you there, Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm a huge fan of emotional spiritual care and emergencies. I've seen it in real time with the 2011 disaster, which I think I've told people about on this show before with the tsunami and researchers going in there, adding a schedule, trying to get people to return back to normal and providing better than an MRE, providing great nutrients, great meals, to be able to trick their body and their mind that everything's okay and it helped those people respond or recover faster. I love the mission of off the grid. I think what you're doing is great things and I really think my listeners to give you a check you out. What we're going to do is we're going to put Off the Grid, your website in our show notes. You're not a sponsor. We should probably tell people that we just thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of what I heard about it. So, yeah. Thanks again Matt for coming on the show.
Guest: Matt Cohen (45m 1s):
John, thanks for the time. I really appreciate it.
Host: John Scardena (45m 6s):
Absolutely. If you liked this episode, if it made you think about business continuity to a whole new way, which has showed up because it was a pretty amazing concept. You got to give us that five-star rating. So lame, but we ask every time give us a five-star rating, subscribe to our podcast, come back next week. If you have a question for Matt, you can do it a couple of ways. Like I said, we're going to put his Off the Grid company in our show notes. So, you can reach out to them directly, you can ask us on social media. Oh my gosh, we get so many emails. Thank you for the emails. But I keep on saying this, ask on social media. So, because other people have the similar question and Matt can see it there too. If you want to work with Doberman Emergency Management, you have a question about business continuity plans, you need a continuity plan yourself, you can always reach out to us at info@dobermanemg.com and we'll see you next week.
