Community outreach
Ensuring employees were safe during and after the storm was the company’s main priority – but after that goal was met, MPF wanted to find ways to help others in the community. “Once safety was established, our thoughts turned immediately to the question of how we could help the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons in the shelters who were in need of hot meals.”
As a food company, Martin Preferred Foods set out to do what it does best – deliver food and feed people.
On Monday, Aug. 28, even though the plant was officially closed, the company was able to deliver a pallet of beef fajitas to the Houston Police Dept. for them to grill and feed first responders. In the days following, and up to two weeks after the storm, MPF continued to deliver meat to the police department and to various shelters around the city to help feed the community.
Most of Martin’s products are “ready to cook” not “ready to eat” so the company partnered with chefs and restauranteurs in Houston to help feed displaced people and first responders in the area. MPF would provide the meat, the chefs would prepare it for those in need.
“Many of the chefs that we serve as our customers were unable to open their restaurants that week due to the storm, so they devoted their time and attention to preparing food in their commercial kitchens to distribute to those affected by the storm,” Tapick explains. “Since so many of our regular customers were closed, we devoted several of our delivery trucks solely to the purpose of making deliveries of donated products to those chefs who were feeding storm victims.”
Throughout the hurricane and its aftermath, MPF donated more than 50,000 lbs. of meat and chicken and more than 1,500 cases of grocery items to the relief efforts.
Thanks to preparedness, Tapick and his team at Martin Preferred Foods weathered Harvey as well as could be expected. However, Tapick says establishing priorities and allowing them to guide all the decisions thereafter was how his company successfully survived the storm. “We could never have foreseen how long the storm would last, or how long the city would be flooded,” he says. “However, we had established clear priorities of safety and caring for others, and we used those priorities to help guide our decisions as each stage of this disaster unfolded.”
