Supporting Philly food during the pandemic: Buy a T-shirt, eat to win a gift card, help workers via ‘tip jar’

Help a hungry family, boost a struggling restaurant, or throw a few bucks to a restaurant worker.

Here are three food-related fund-raising campaigns:

Buy a T-shirt, feed a family sums up a fund-raising campaign from restaurateurs Rob and Maggie Wasserman, Giordano Garden Groceries’ Marcello Giordano, and city Deputy Managing Director Joanna Otero-Cruz.

For every “We Are Philly” T-shirt sold ($25), Giordano provides a produce box, valued at $18, that is given away through the city’s official food-distribution sites. Each box contains a half-gallon of milk, two tomatoes, one cucumber, four potatoes, two lemons, a head of iceberg lettuce, a dozen eggs, three pounds of bananas, and a loaf of sliced bread.

In about three weeks, the program has sold 3,429 T-shirts and 190 additional box donations, totaling 3,619 boxes. The first 1,100 boxes were delivered June 10. Rob Wasserman, who owns Rouge, Twenty Manning Grill, Audrey Claire, and is a partner at Snap Custom Pizza and founder of the Philadelphia Burger Brawl, said they expect to distribute 500 boxes a week.

Shirts come in blue, green, red, and orange, keyed to Philadelphia sports teams. They can be ordered through wearephilly.net.

Philly ad agency Think-Traffic came up with an Instagram idea to drive business to restaurants in various neighborhoods during the pandemic.

It’s pretty simple: Choose any restaurant on the list; order $15 or more in takeout, delivery, gift cards, or merch; and direct-message or email the receipt to Think-Traffic. Each counts as one entry during the campaign, and five winners each win a $100 gift card to their favorite restaurant.

Previous drives have included restaurants in Queen Village and Rittenhouse as well as Fishtown and South Philly, and Old City and Center City. The fourth drive (East Passyunk and Fairmount) is starting on Think-Traffic’s Instagram.

Restaurants can email Think-Traffic to participate.

The goal, says Think-Traffic’s Kate Talamo, is to give away $5,000 in gift cards.

Michelle Cudia, a bartender at Tria, started a virtual tip jar in March for restaurant workers. She said she got the idea from a Washington, D.C-based bartender whom she met at the women’s bartending competition Speed Rack.

It’s simple: Industry workers register, leaving their names, restaurant, and PayPal or Venmo address on the Google Form.

Donors go to the Virtual Tip Jar’s spreadsheet, which allows searching by the name of the workers and restaurants, and leave “tips.” Cudia also turned her personal Venmo into a collection point to allow donors to add to a tip pool. (Admittedly the pool is not much. In the four distributions so far, each of the 1,700 workers on the list has gotten a few bucks.)

Cudia doesn’t see the tips that are directed straight to the individual workers, as they are private transactions.

Cudia, who is easing back to work, said she was gratified to hear from some people on the list who asked her to steer their tips to the pool because they received unemployment benefits.