The Business Case
The Center for Food, Youth & Community is needed for two reasons:
To be able to meet continued and growing needs in our community, and
To do so more efficiently and cost-effectively.
The Center for Food, Youth & Community is needed for two reasons: to be able to meet continued and growing needs in our community, and to do so more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Ceres has reached capacity in our two small kitchens; none have adequate refrigeration, and none can be remodeled. We are literally bursting at the seams.
One of two remaining kitchens is leased, which puts our production capacity at risk. We had a third kitchen at the SAY Dream Center for years, and with SAY declaring Chapter 7 Bankruptcy, we lost this site in 2024 of February.
At our current scale, managing multiple kitchens is inefficient; we need more staff than we would if we were centralized and there are other inefficiencies related to moving product around, the scale of equipment in our kitchens and more.
Ceres is part of the Food is Medicine Coalition, a national coalition of medically tailored meal providers, most of whom have been in operation for more than 30 years and are preparing and delivering 800,000 to 3,000,000 meals annually. In designing and planning for the Center for Food, Youth & Community, we consulted extensively with several of these agencies to understand their staffing, org charts, production models, kitchen designs and business models.
By the end of the first full year in operation, with a modest increase in meal production, we expect to see a 12% reduction in our per-meal costs. Further reductions in costs per meal are expected as we continue to scale.
We designed and are building the Center – and its capacity of 800,000 meals a year – for the longterm. We expect scaling to full capacity to take at least a decade. Ceres will move to full-capacity operations at the Center gradually and in stages, in concert with growing contract and other funding sources.
Because of efficiencies gained by centralizing production, we expect Ceres’ staffing level to be stable when we transition to the new Center and to grow only modestly as we scale meal production and delivery.
Ceres has a comprehensive business plan created as part of the due diligence prior to launching the Center for Food, Youth & Community capital campaign. It projects growth, income, and expenses for the next seven years. We are happy to share the plan with you.
Increased production will primarily be funded by scaling MediCal health care contracts with Partnership HealthPlan of California and Kaiser Permanente.
Diversification of income sources has always been a fundamental strategy to protect Ceres’ ability to operate. Today, nearly a third of Ceres’ annual revenues come from fee-for-service contracts, a third from more than a thousand individual donors, and the remaining third from corporate donors, foundation grants and other miscellaneous sources.
Ceres has a strong Board of Directors and an active Finance Committee that provide guidance and oversight of financial performance on a monthly basis. We have had clean audits since we began auditing our financial statements in 2012.