🌟 Introducing Yuru Guo, a Funding Futures Programme award winner and founder of Hey! Food is Ready. 🌟
27-year-old Yuru got the idea for setting up her social enterprise when she was a student wanting to connect and make friends through food. Fast forward only a few years and Hey! Food is Ready! has already catered the pre-event as part of Taylor Swift’s latest world tour at Wembley Stadium and even for the British Royal Family. 🍽️
Hey! Food is Ready! connects certified cooks from minority ethnic groups with companies seeking catering for events. The platform helps refugee, immigrant and stay-at-home cooks, to share their culture and stories while generating income. So far, the organisation’s chef community represents over 60 countries, and 80% of the chefs represented are female, compared to the industry standard of professional chefs, which is only 19%.
Yuru, who has previously lived in New York, New Delhi and European cities and has family roots in Korea and China, now lives in Willesden Green, North London.
🔊 She said: “I think for people coming to a new country they can feel very disconnected from the community and their culture, and one of the main things that we can connect on is food. Food is the universal language.
“I was living in Durham, and was sharing accommodation with people from all around the world, and I started hosting a Friday night potluck dinner together. And each of our friends would bring a dish that was part of their culture, a family recipe, and we would share the food and stories.
“And I thought, why don't I create this, a platform where people, like my friends, can use it to share their native food cultures and family recipes with the wider community.
“Also, I thought why can’t I help people gain a meaningful income through the platform. So like the idea of Uber or Airbnb, I was helping people to make a side hustle in the food space.
“Now it has grown into a catering marketplace platform connecting independent chefs from different cultural backgrounds with companies looking for a diverse selection of event catering options."
Yuru has already worked with 125 independent chefs from diverse backgrounds and has now been successful in securing £18,000 from our Funding Futures Programme - to further grow the platform, with 350 chefs already on the waiting list to work with the social enterprise.
🤝 The Funding Futures Programme - a joint fund from Unltd, Co-op Foundation and Phoenix Group and delivered by Unltd - has been set up to support young social entrepreneurs working in the areas of financial inclusion and literacy.
🔗 To find out more about the Funding Futures Programme visit 👉 https://lnkd.in/dgWAWS_d
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