When Ricardo Rocha tells you Bondadosa is a people first organization, believe him.
There is literally no way Denver metro based Bondadosa could do what it has without that foundational belief. For frame of reference, in 2018, the organization’s first year, they delivered 380 orders for food from families who needed them. In 2019, that number climbed to 2,700 deliveries of fresh food. In the last eight weeks, they’ve delivered 152,760 meals and done 27,000 fresh food deliveries.
“Having the right people in the right place at the right time is critical,” said Rocha, who is Bondadosa’s founder and CEO. “You have to let people lean into their area of expertise, solve problems and make the work happen. You have to trust that we’re all in this because we understand everyone must eat. We share that empathy.
” To further demonstrate his point, Rocha explained that the organization that started with just a handful of employees now has 51 as well as an additional 60 in its network and 250 volunteers ready to work. They have tapped into the wealth of currently laid off culinary workforce in the Denver metro area to provide even more workforce and volunteer force in this extraordinary moment, about 3,000 additional people. This ability to expand their capacity was bolstered by relationships with producers and growers who can keep their supply of quality, fresh food flowing and who can, in turn, benefit from partnering with the organization.
Bondadosa’s ability to scale up to a breathtaking degree at breakneck speed was only possible because of the way it has always done business: focus on food systems change, take risks and create unexpected relationships. Here are just a few ways the organization has innovated for expansion.
Build relationships across the food system. From the beginning, Bondadosa was interested in remaking the food system to improve the purchasing power of people and help the growers and producers directly. “All the good and the bad in the system is funded by consumers. We needed to create ways for our consumers to fund more of the good and less of the bad.” They did that by starting with the radical notion that everyone deserves fresh, quality food. Then they considered what it would take to bring farm to table options to individuals and families living in food deserts or with little access to quality food. The answer came after Rocha convinced Denver-based Growhaus to let Bondadosa participate in their existing CSA program. By providing delivery of Growhaus’ CSA boxes to paying members, they are able to subsidize delivery of those same boxes to families who need them. So now Bondadosa delivers SNAP reimbursed boxes alongside the other boxes, where a delivery fee is charged, as well as meals and other groceries. “The economics work at scale,” Rocha said. “They work when we are doing 600 deliveries a day in a blended financial model.”
Pilot ideas with replicability in mind. Soon, Bondadosa will be putting what they’ve learned piloting and expanding SNAP deliveries to work for families who use WIC. Their ability to form relationships that connect producers and growers with consumers directly will provide an initial 150 families with food and other items they need to raise healthy children.
Use technology to solve problems. Bondadosa allows local food producers to connect directly with consumers via a sustainable logistics platform. Bondadosa handles the orders and delivery, allowing producers and growers to focus on what they do best. With the hopes of using an all-electric fleet of delivery vehicles, Bondadosa manages to pay all staff a living wage and still be price competitive in the delivery market.
On this day, Rocha is moving between watching a local chef prep and smoke 1,000 chicken breasts for the meal offering and trying to smooth the kinks out of his work around for finding additional storage and cold storage for the dramatically increased amount of product needed to ramp up meals for the Denver Metro Emergency Network. He is standing between two 18-wheelers rented from Shamrock Foods. Rocha is fond of saying that Bondadosa “tackles one impossible thing at a time.” And in a food system structured around historic inequities from sourcing to funding, that’s what change will take. "We’ve got to be scrappy,"Rocha said. "I wish our food system were scrappier. But we will continue to be. We’ll keep demonstrating impact and scaling up. And we’ll remake this inequitable system piece by piece.”