Many businesses were hit extremely hard by COVID-19. There are thousands of stories and articles about this that you could be reading right now, but we wanted to share ours with you today. This isn’t a story of fear, or tragedy, but a story of resilience and hope.
Quest Food Management Services began in 1985, driven by the desire to always do the right thing. Striving to build relationships that last, and build trust between the people we serve as well as our employees. Before this pandemic, we served 150,000 people every day with integrity, responsiveness, accountability, respect, and excellence. We serve business & industry, higher education, conference centers and the K-12 segment.
With the recent closing of nearly all schools in the Midwest, we have had no choice but to furlough nearly our entire workforce. On March 16th, we had to furlough over 830 employees in an attempt to keep our mission alive and bring certainty to the customers we’ve served all these years. Both hourly and salaried employees were affected by this. These furloughs extended to a variety of our team members, including people in our corporate office, not just the individuals working hourly or part-time.
As this situation continues to unfold with regard to the uncertainty of when schools and businesses will be reopening their doors, Mike McTaggart, CEO and Owner, has announced that he is forgoing his salary until further notice to help provide needed support for Quest employees.
In addition to McTaggart’s refusal of pay, he and Quest President, Nick Saccaro, have been working with senators and representatives to try to get paycheck protection acts passed to further support the furloughed employees. Our leadership team has been working nonstop to protect and continue to provide as many resources for employees as they can. In less than a week, an employee Food Pantry has been setup – 4 locations have been stocked with groceries, dry goods and produce and will begin distributing early next week. The leaders have also started the Quest Care Fund, which accommodates paycheck contributions to employees in need due to COVID-19 hardships.
Since the closing of these schools, we’ve been putting our health on the line to serve hundreds of meals to the people who depend on school-provided meal plans. We are currently producing and distributing meals in conjunction with 48 of our current partners. With a significantly reduced workforce we are serving breakfast, lunch, and now even delivering dinners to families in need.
Through the past couple weeks, we have worked on an intensely personal level with our partners. Several partners that have stepped up and agreed to support the staffs that serve their communities with subsidized and even full pay to make them whole. Teachers that have set-up Go Fund Me accounts to help with our food service employees. Community members sewing masks for our employees still fortunate enough to work. This generosity and support that we can’t repay, but is the essence of what a true partnership is.
After reading our story, we hope you will find a desire to support those who are out of work from this pandemic, to support a local business struggling to make ends meet, or to consider a neighbor of yours who might be struggling to put food on the table for their families. While there is so much heartache felt from this pandemic, there is also a real opportunity for each of us to do the right thing; even a small act of kindness or care can make a huge difference. A year from now, we will all have an incredible comeback story to tell, but in the meantime, let’s hold onto hope and gratitude.