A quick search on Sam Polk, Co-Founder and CEO of Everytable, and you’ll see countless headlines telling the story of a former hedge fund trader who left a lucrative Wall Street career many would kill to have. His origin story started in Los Angeles, California, though. Growing up helping his mother run homeless medical clinics on Skid Row, he witnessed economic disparity in the community. Fast forward to adulthood, ready for a change that was a nod to his original life path, Polk embarked on a new, healthier mission to which every household could have access.
Before Everytable’s launch, there was Feast, an idea born during a Netflix food documentary weekend binge with his wife. After watching A Place at the Table and learning about food deserts and food insecurity, Polk wanted to make healthier meals accessible to everyone.
“We ran these groups in South Los Angeles that were a peer-led support structure for parents who wanted to get healthy in a food environment difficult for themselves and their families,” says Polk. “These groups comprised nutrition education, cooking skills, and social and emotional community support.”
According to research published by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ Public Exchange, 1 in 4 Angelenos experienced food insecurity in 2022. The study also showed that the issue wasn’t just access to healthy food. It was price, quality and variety. Polk was already ahead of the curve and learned this after working with many families in South Los Angeles. People craved healthier food options but couldn’t afford them. That is when the idea for Everytable was born.
“We created a new model for making high-quality, restaurant-quality, farm-to-table food that we sell for less than the price of fast food,” says Polk. “How we did that is we centralized our cooking in a single kitchen. In Southern California we have 38 stores but just one kitchen. It’s a 34,000-square-foot, highly efficient commissary kitchen taking ingredients directly from farms. We have fresh protein and make our spices, sauces and dressings. We cook everything from scratch into fresh, healthy, delicious meals, then send them from the commissary to our 38 stores.”
Since the Everytable stores don’t have a kitchen, the operation is less expensive. Their main goal is to nourish the community without families split into the haves and have-nots system. “We thought, could we create a system that brought value to everybody but also was inclusive so that everybody could participate and benefit? That allowed each store to be profitable, but was respectful of the economic realities of every community,” says Polk.
Although Everytable operates out of one kitchen, keeping in mind economic inequality, Polk and his team still wanted to honor the different communities that each Everytable operated. “We have stores in diverse communities like Santa Monica, Inglewood, South Los Angeles, Monterey Park, etc. Our strategy from the beginning has been to embrace the richness of the diversity of Los Angeles and create a menu that reflects that diversity,” says Polk. “We’ll collaborate with chefs from Compton or East Los Angeles, and these collaborative meals celebrate the cultures and cuisines of the city.”
Having first-hand interactions with the income disparities in Los Angeles through his philanthropic upbringing and Feast, Polk knew it wasn’t enough to provide access to healthier food options. He also needed to enrich the communities he was entering monetarily. One way is Everytable’s Franchise Training Program.
“The standard franchise model requires the franchisee to have a high liquid net worth,” says Polk. “Everytable is all about equality of opportunity and equality of access. There are a lot of talented entrepreneurs in under-resourced communities that don’t have a lot of capital. We took what was typically a two-way relationship between a franchisor and a franchisee and brought in a third node to that relationship.” Polk’s goal was to level the playing field.
“We’ve got talented franchisees who want to own Everytables,” Polk continues. “We bring philanthropic capital to lend money to these franchisees who don’t have high liquid net capital worth and allow them to own their own Everytable business. It’s this beautiful merger of stakeholders who want to see healthy food access spread and economic opportunity spread. We found a way to bring that together into this social equity franchise model.”
Another Everytable initiative is their Pay It Forward meals program. “In the beginning, every single store at Everytable had a Pay It Forward wall where people could purchase meals for in-need customers,” says Polk. “Those customers who didn’t have it could come in, see a free meal on a wall, grab that Post-it note and use it as cash. We had to curtail that program for various reasons, like moving to a single staffing model and the homelessness crisis. We’re rolling it back out in every store.”
Pay It Forward meal’s mission, in a way, is a nod to Polk’s upbringing –serving everyone in need in the community. “The beauty of the Pay It Forward model is its inclusivity,” says Polk. “Everytable brings value to middle-income communities, and it brings value to low-income communities. It allows customers to pay it forward and ensure everybody has access to a fresh meal.
The Everytable team is also impacting the tech space with SmartFridges. “SmartFridge is a healthy vending machine. It’s like a refrigerator holding fresh, healthy, delicious meals that we’ve made,” says Polk. “A customer can swipe a credit card that unlocks the fridge. You pick whatever meals you want and pull them out, and your credit card will be charged for those meals. It’s a form of automated retail that we put in colleges, hospitals, manufacturing plants and Amazon warehouses. We did a joint venture with a scrappy technology company that wanted to build these SmartFridges. We co-own the intellectual property, they produce the SmartFridges and we pay them for that.”
Although Polk’s notoriety may be as the former Wall Street hedge fund trader, the other part of his journey led him right back to his roots. “I sort of have two parts of myself,” says Polk. “One is ambitious and has this desire to create something big. I think I mostly got that from my dad. The other side is rooting for the underdog and trying to figure out how to make the world more fair and equitable. I got that from my mom. Everytable is about bringing both of those things together. Also, in that same vein, bringing together my experience on Wall Street and my experience running nonprofits into a single business that integrates all of those things.”
Currently, Everytable operates in Northern and Southern California, but Polk dreams of an Everytable location in every community in the country. “I feel incredibly grateful,” says Polk. “Everytable has tremendous market opportunity. We’ll have built a large, profitable company that is also doing something I care deeply about in the world. It’s as intellectually and creatively challenging as anything I could have imagined. I feel really fortunate to have, in a lot of ways, found my place.”
AUTHOR
Allanah Dykes is a freelance writer whose niche is home decor and food, but she has written in almost every field from mental health to political op-eds. Her favorite pastimes are listening to Biggie and Bach and enjoying New York Italian ices and slices
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