The Edit by Brett Graff
Our editor scoured the scene and found some stories worth sharing....
Bacardi to Donate Alcohol
Well, we’ve been counting on Bacardi to supply the booze for years, but now the party is really getting started at eight production plants. The family-owned liquor luminary has announced that manufacturing sites here and in Mexico, France, England, Italy and Scotland will supply the much-needed alcohol that’s necessary to make hand sanitizer. In fact, the company has committed to help producing more than 267,000 gallons of hand sanitizer as worldwide demand continues to exceed supply, a COVID-19 thing for sure. Bacardi is also playing a part in donating these products to local organizations and emergency responders, as well as its employees and contractors. In addition, the company is providing alcohol at cost to select partner companies looking to ramp up their production of hand sanitizers for commercial sale. The company says its temporary, emergency actions will not disrupt the supply of brands in the Bacardi portfolio. Thank goodness, because survival has many pillars and Grey Goose vodka – with a factory in Cognac France supplying 7,600 gallons of alcohol – is most certainly among them.
Local Restaurants Feed First Responders
Meanwhile, this local dining duo on North Miami Avenue — Grails Miami and Spanglish Craft Cocktail Bar + Kitchen – is donating meals to first responders in uniform and unemployed members of the hospitality industry. For each meal sold at its curbside takeout, it’s donating up to 100 meals per day but put the stop at that number only because of limited supplies. Eat your way to helping with an order you can place by calling (786) 870-4313. Over on Miami Beach, Ray Schnitzer had to close his infamous 11th Street Diner but he’s still supplying meals to the Mount Saini Hospital ER Staff.
“We are all here to help them because they are helping us,” says Schnitzer, “they are the ones we’re thanking.”
Restaurant Relief
The Food Network & Cooking Channel South Beach Wine & Food Festival presented by Capital One has launched an industry relief fund to help independently owned and operated restaurants and bars in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. The Fund has launched with an initial $1 million, including a founding donation of $500,000 from the Festival’s benefiting charity, Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, along with significant additional financial support from its partners. The fund will provide grants to the venues suffering because of Covid-19 and the ensuring closures. It will initially support restaurants and bars that have participated in South Beach Wine & Food Festival within the past five years and afterward, open up support to any independently owned and operated restaurant or bar in South Florida.
“With the hospitality industry facing unprecedented devastation, it’s our turn to give back to the people in the industry who have been there for us,” said Lee Brian Schrager, Founder and Director, SOBEWFF, “and we are prepared to come to their aid now, when they need us the most.”
Brett Graff is SocialMiami.com’s managing editor and has been a journalist covering money, people and power for over 20 years. Graff contributes to national media outlets including Reuters, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Maxim, and the PBS show, Nightly Business Report. A former U.S. government economist, her nationally syndicated column The Home Economist is first published in The Miami Herald and then on the Tribune Content Agency, where it’s available to over 400 publications nationwide. She is broadcast weekly on two iHeartRadio news shows and is the author of “Not Buying It: Stop Overspending & Start Raising Happier, Healthier, More Successful Kids,” a parenting guide for people who might be tempted to buy their children the very obstacles they’re trying to avoid.
