Kraft Heinz pulls school-approved Lunchables off the menu
Kraft Heinz pulls Lunchables from US school lunch programs due to weak demand and sodium content concerns.
Straight Arrow News
Three Wisconsin restaurants were awarded $20,000 each from food giant Heinz’s Black Kitchen Initiative, which aims to support Black-owned food businesses.
The funds couldn’t come soon enough for husband-and-wife chefs Anomalous and Blake Campbell, owners of Anomaly Catering. The duo faced several setbacks opening their restaurant, Yo’ Mama’s Kitchen, on Teutonia Avenue in Milwaukee.
Thieves hit the building 30 days after their September grand opening, taking “almost everything except for the walls,” Anomalous Campbell said.
And a week later, an SUV plowed into the building, which the city eventually condemned.
“It’s been a journey,” Campbell said.
The Campbells are searching for a new space but still plan to use the grant money to fund their youth culinary education program, called Gastronomy Art Studio, and to sustain their catering company. Initially, the grant was to finish the build-out of their now-condemned building.
“We’re definitely going to utilize the funding to get us back on track,” said Campbell, who started Anomaly Catering in 2019.
The Campbells are among three Wisconsin restaurants to receive the funding from the Black Kitchen Initiative. The others were Chicago’s House of Hoagies in Menasha and Daddy’s Soul Food & Grille on Milwaukee’s west side.
The Black Kitchen Initiative awarded $20,000 grants to 45 Black restaurants across the country — a total of nearly $1 million. The initiative is a partnership between Heinz, Southern Restaurants for Racial Justice and The LEE Initiative, a Kentucky-based organization creating and implementing programs to address diversity and equality issues in the restaurant industry.
The initiative aims to sustain Black food businesses while preserving the legacy of Black food in America. The grant money can be used in various ways, including restaurant renovations, marketing, staff development, new equipment purchase, menu expansion or supporting youth culinary arts programs.
For now, the Campbells are prioritizing their catering business and the youth culinary program. Both operate out of a commercial kitchen in Cudahy until they get a new home-base kitchen. Since 2021, the Gastronomy Art Studio has taught kids ages 15-19 about the science, heritage and culture of cooking.
Students learn kitchen fundamentals like how to dehydrate herbs to make seasonings, understand cooking processes and how chemical reactions create certain foods. They learn food safety and can be certified in food handling. And they receive a stipend for participating.
Over 200 students have gone through the program and three are employed with the catering company.
“It’s kind of like just helping them advance in their culinary careers,” Campbell said, noting the grant will help sustain the program, which has been funded from their catering profits.
Daddy’s Soul Food & Grille has been serving southern style cuisine for 10 years. But inflation has taken a toll on the business, said Angela Smith, who runs the business side of the restaurant while her husband, Bennie, runs the kitchen.
With high food prices, like everyone else in the industry has, Smith said the restaurant is struggling. Before the pandemic, food costs were 30% of their budget. Now, they’re 49%. She said that’s half their revenue.
“That hits hard when you are a small business,” Smith said. “When I was told we got the grant, it just gave us a sigh of relief that we didn’t have to keep struggling from week to week.”
The couple will use the funds to shore up their bottom line and purchase needed kitchen equipment to sustain the catering side of the business. This will allow them to take on large catering events, including preparing hundreds of meals for Northcott Neighborhood House’s annual Thanksgiving event.
“Getting caterings of that magnitude obviously helps our business and it keeps our employees employed, keeps the lights on,” Smith said.
In October, the couple moved Daddy’s location to 754 N. 27th St. and closed their location at 6108 W. Blue Mound Road, which opened during the pandemic.
“We couldn’t afford it anymore,” Smith said.
Smith said she felt honored to be selected for the Black Kitchen Initiative.
“There’s plenty of restaurants out there that could have benefited from this and I’m just happy we were one of them,” she said. “That really took some weight off (Bennie’s) shoulders. Mine, too. … If we stay in the black, we should be OK.”
