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Bowls for the Brave Update

Julie, from The Purple Beet, and I wanted to do something for the healthcare workers in the coronavirus intensive care units across metro Detroit and decided to partner up! On Monday, April 13th, we launched Bowls for the Brave - her amazing açaí smoothie as our base and a scoop of Teffola on top. We agreed to donate 25 bowls to the Detroit Medical Center Receiving Hospital in Midtown then opened it up to our communities to see if they might be interested in donating as well. Each bowl was $6 and every single bowl purchased would go to a hospital staff member.

Our initial goal was to donate 75 bowls including our 25. The donations started coming in and within a couple hours we were at 100 bowls. We upped the goal to 150 but by the next morning, just 24 hours after launching, we hit 300. And then Christensen Law reached out, saw what we were doing and matched our 300 bowls to hit 600! We were absolutely blown away! We quickly ordered more supplies and sourced additional frozen berries - definitely weren’t expecting the response we got. A few days later, one of my distributors Cherry Capital Foods agreed to donate 50 gallons of Oatly oat milk.

Hours before the donations closed an additional 70 bowls came in bringing the grand total to 926 bowls to be donated. It was an incredible 8 days of the community rallying around those brave women and men on the frontlines. But then the work began!

Blending day arrived with tools and supplies we’d never used in the Teffola kitchen before - commercial Vitamix, bowls and lids, oat milk and the walk in freezer. There was açaí smoothie everywhere, a trash bin full of Oatly containers, and 427 bowls in the freezer for our first delivery.

Megan, one of the Teffola bakers, came with me to deliver the first 300 bowls: 150 to Detroit Medical Center and 150 to Henry Ford Macomb. Armed with masks, gloves and Lysol wipes we handed over the bowls with compostable spoons (while explaining what an açaí bowl was!) to the excited and grateful hospital staff.

It was an incredible experience and I’m so grateful and honored to have been a part of it. There were a lot of people involved in making this initiative such a success and I’d like to mention them here: Julie from The Purple Beet, Sabrina and her team at Anchorlight Creative, Christensen Law, Cherry Capital Foods and the incredible community of Teffola. Thank you so much for choosing to be a part of this. Bowls for the Brave will return again next year I promise!