Chick-fil-A will open its first restaurant in Cincinnati’s Clifton neighborhood on Thursday, October 22, and the company is marking the opening with a $45,000 commitment to hunger relief across Greater Cincinnati, two days ahead of the restaurant’s first customers on Thursday morning.
The donation splits three ways: $25,000 to Feeding America benefiting Freestore Foodbank, $10,000 to Our Daily Bread and $10,000 to Last Mile Food Rescue, the company announced Tuesday.
The new restaurant, Chick-fil-A Clifton, is located at 198 East McMillan Street. It will serve guests Monday through Saturday from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., offering dine-in, drive-thru, carry-out, third-party delivery and catering.
Chick-fil-A, Inc. has selected Kevin Lopez as the restaurant’s local owner-operator. As with other locations, the Clifton restaurant is locally owned and operated rather than run directly by the Atlanta-based company.
The restaurant will also join the Chick-fil-A Shared Table program in partnership with Our Daily Bread and Last Mile Food Rescue. Through the program, Last Mile coordinates collection and delivery of surplus food from the restaurant to Our Daily Bread, where it is used to prepare meals for neighbors in need.
With Clifton joining, Shared Table participation has reached 100 percent among Chick-fil-A restaurants in the Cincinnati area. Nationwide, the company says the program has helped create more than 50 million meals from surplus food that would otherwise have gone to waste.
The opening pairs two kinds of giving. The $45,000 is a one-time grant split among three organizations, led by Freestore Foodbank, the Cincinnati food bank in the Feeding America network. The Shared Table commitment is the ongoing piece: surplus food prepared at the Clifton kitchen will be picked up and delivered by Last Mile Food Rescue to Our Daily Bread on a continuing basis, turning the restaurant’s leftovers into meals long after opening week ends.
For Clifton, a dense neighborhood of students, hospital workers and longtime residents just east of the University of Cincinnati, Thursday’s opening adds a new fast-food option on McMillan Street, and a new daily source of donated meals for two of the city’s front-line hunger organizations.
Photo: Mark Turnauckas, CC BY-SA