City Fresh Foods, Inc.

Catering to their market—figuratively and literally—brothers Glynn and Sheldon Lloyd have grown an ethnic food service business in Dorchester into a thriving enterprise.

Glynn Lloyd is an experienced entrepreneur who nonetheless considers himself an educator by vocation. An alumnus of the Teach For America program, in which college graduates with degrees in areas other than education are sent to teach in tough schools throughout the country, Glynn (pronounced Glenn) returned from, teaching high school in Baton Rouge to his native Boston and eventually found himself teaching Dorchester residents in a GED prep program.

The Federated Dorchester Neighborhood program in which Glynn was teaching concerns itself not just with helping its students pass the GED exam, but also with placing them in jobs afterwards. The idea of City Fresh Foods, a catering/ delivery/take-out business run by Glynn and his brother Sheldon, grew out of this context. "Why remain dependent on others in the commu¬nity to create a job market for our graduates when we can create jobs ourselves?" asks Glynn.

Glynn's experience as an entre¬preneur goes back to his junior high school days, when he started a land¬scaping business; by the time he let go of it—when he was an undergraduate at Boston University—he and his employees had over 100 regular clients. Glynn also had previous experience in the food service business: upon first returning to Boston from Louisiana he worked at Fair Foods, a non-profit distributor of perishable foods that would otherwise be discarded by the local businesses that sell them— produce, day-old bread, and other foods. At Fair Foods Glynn worked in operations and distribution, so he was well equipped to deal with the challenges of providing food for a large clientele.

The result of this eclectic back¬ground is City Fresh Foods, located at Four Corners in Dorchester. City Fresh is very much a "for-profit" company—a profitable one at that. The company specializes in cuisines that reflect the tastes and back¬ground of the community it serves— Caribbean, Latin American, and Traditional Southern, and its core business is providing meals for charter schools and delivered "meals on wheels" for local elderly that require the service. City Fresh currently serves eight schools with about 500 students and delivers over 1,300 meals to elderly clients daily. The company also has a take-out counter at its Bowdoin Street storefront, and provides private catering for functions—the newest and (so far) smallest component of its business.

Once Glynn got the company started, he soon realized he needed somebody to share the burden of managing it. Glynn convinced his brother Sheldon, an experienced sales professional with entrepreneur¬ial experience of his own, to come join him. The two brothers have been partners and co-owners since.
City Fresh currently employs 35 local residents—20 as full-time employees and 15 drivers who operate as independent sub¬contractors. In addition to providing employment opportunities, City Fresh strives to serve the Dorchester community by offering its customers healthy food. Locally grown organic vegetables are used when possible, and although the ethnic cuisines offered by City Fresh are not gener¬ally associated with healthy eating, the company limits saturated fat and salt content in an effort to offer customers their favorite foods in a more healthful form.

City Fresh started in 1998 with a grant from the City of Boston. The grant was essentially a loan that wouldn't have to be paid back so long as the company maintained certain benchmarks—such as keep¬ing a required number of people employed. The company has since gotten loans from local community development programs and kept their operating cash flow going by taking out higher-interest, private loans against receivables. Eventually City Fresh got the attention of Boston Community Capital, a financing firm that runs a venture fund earmarked for investment in businesses that serve local communities in Boston (see sidebar below). Boston Community Capital bought an equity stake in City Fresh, and the resulting cash inflow enabled the company to purchase the Four Corners building that houses their operation, increasing profit¬ability, and to concentrate on growing their core business rather than raising operating cash. The Lloyd brothers re main majority owners.

Glynn and Sheldon have turned what started out as an idea for providing job oppor¬tunities for GED grads into a profitable $2 million annual business. Visions for the future include breaking into institutional catering beyond the charter school market, and expanding into other locations and communities in the Greater Boston area. Given their track record, it's not hard to imagine that we'll be hearing a lot more about City Fresh Foods in the future.