My Moral Compass: How Deepti Sharma Fights for Small Businesses, Diversity Inclusion, and Community Action
By Stacey Lindsay
In 2009, Deepti Sharma was at a food truck when she had an idea. She was in the throes of studying for the LSATs and the line was taking forever. When she finally got her order, a pool of questions formed in her mind. “How can I have access to this food truck without having to wait in line?” she says, reflecting on the people behind the business. “What is their story? What is their background? What do they need?”
At the time, food trucks—a longtime urban means for grabbing a bite on-the-go—were rising in popularity. Some were popping up in bright colors and teeming with inventive culinary spins, others were bare bones. But the mission was the same: convenience. Sharma’s experience that day was the opposite, which sparked her idea to start FoodtoEat, an online ordering platform for food trucks. She wanted to make it easier to access the food trucks.
What made this business unique was that Sharma put the focus on the founders. Primarily immigrants and people of color, they were not marketing themselves to successfully scale. Amidst the growing American way of wanting everything immediate and perfect, she wanted to help the small business owners tell their story, present their products well, and attract more customers. This altruism mirrors the iconoclastic decisions Sharma has become known for. She’s held no desires to walk a walk that didn’t mirror her values. (Regarding the LSATs, she didn’t end up going to law school. “That wasn’t the place for me,” she says with a quiet conviction rarely seen these days.)
As FoodtoEat grew, Sharma and her team wanted to offer a bigger market, so they began including restaurants in their platform. Much like the big-name food ordering and delivery platforms, FoodtoEat offered the convenience of ordering from your favorite local restaurant. The difference was that Sharma wasn’t charging the nearly 30 percent that other third-party platforms were, she says. Sharma’s parents owned and ran a restaurant, so she saw the challenges many face to stay afloat.
FoodtoEat gained a strong customer base, but Sharma was hitting a wall with both the competition and her funding prospects. The huge third-party companies charging ludicrous amounts were still trumping her business. And the latter kept showing her closed doors or cold shoulders. “I didn’t come from an ivy league background. I didn’t work at a large corporation or a consulting firm or banking,” she says, pontificating on the things often expected of entrepreneurs seeking capital. And she is a woman of color. “I was being asked, ‘when are you going to have a family?’” she says before rattling off the grim numbers that still stand true for the amount of venture capital women, and women of color, in particular, see.
“If you invest in people, why wouldn’t you invest in someone who grew up in it, and who cares so much?” she says.
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While Sharma was growing up in New York City, every part of her upbringing seems to have been calibrated to foster in her a desire to make people feel seen. She lived with her parents, who emigrated from India, in a diverse area of Queens. Her school was “filled with kids from all over the world,” as she describes it. “We had Pakistanis. We had Black kids. We had kids from all over Asia.” This melting pot didn’t stop her from receiving criticism. Sharma would often be the brunt of jokes when she’d bring homemade Indian food to school or wear a Bindi. “Here you are, growing up around kids that all look different; that have their own backgrounds, races, and ethnicities that they bring to the table,” she says. “If you’re so accepting of theirs, why aren’t they so accepting of yours?”
Part of Sharma’s middle school curriculum was community service, which she and her peers satisfied during school hours. It was amazing, she says, and it changed her—so much so that by the time she got to college, she was armed with a civics-focused drive. She majored in political science and landed her first internship working on a campaign in NYC. “That’s where my life changed again,” she says in describing the potential for impact that she saw. “These are people that have the power to bring in legislation that will help a community thrive.”
For the next four years, Sharma worked on campaigns. She hit the pavement, shook hands, made calls. These grassroots efforts fueled in her a passion for community-focused work. It also gave her an unexpected business acumen. “Working on a campaign is very similar to running a company,” she says. “It’s very grassroots. You don’t have a lot of resources in the beginning and you work with what you got.”
When it comes to her malleability, it likely helps that Sharma is inclusive in everything she does. She doesn’t see masses, she sees people. If there’s a problem, there are individuals with backgrounds, families, interests behind that problem. Those individuals likely need help, attention, respect. In an Instagram post in May, she reflected on the needs of people who are gravely impacted by the pandemic. “Just because you don’t know anyone personally who has died or been affected by #covid19 it doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” she writes.
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After several years of running FoodtoEat, Sharma realized it was time to pivot. The competition from the third-party food delivery platforms were starting to drown her people-first endeavor. And the investing opportunities were not showing her warmth. So, she and her team went back to the drawing board. How could they really help these mom-and-pop food trucks and restaurants be sustainable? The answer was in catering, one of the businesses’ most profitable aspects of their business.
FoodtoEat “2.0” today, as Sharma calls it, brokers corporate catering jobs for immigrant-, women-, and minority-owned food businesses throughout New York City. The platform makes it easy for businesses to consolidate their food and beverage orders for large company meetings and events. It also permeates the dire corporate need for greater—and more genuine—diversity and inclusion. “We saw that when companies were considering this, it was only through the hiring process,” says Sharma. “How do you create a more inclusive environment? You do so by providing food that is representative of foods all over the world. That represents some of the people that you are starting to hire.”
“Order Nigerian food Order Indian food,” she continues. “Order authentic food from people’s authentic background so they feel seen and understood.”
Often Sharma will invite the owner who cooked the food to come in and present the meals, taking the time to tell their story. It is a way to further humanize the business and to honor the people behind it. If they cannot make it, Sharma will include a photograph with the spread. Type in #imadeyourfood on Instagram, the hashtag movement created by the FoodtoEat team, and you’ll see the smiling faces behind the Ghana roasted corn and Mediterranean hummus that’s been served. This, says Sharma, is a way to continue to tell their stories.
Since the pandemic, FoodtoEat has been halted in many of its traditional ways, which has given Sharma and her team another reason to pivot, albeit temporarily. While corporate catering is idle and the FoodtoEat offices are closed, she’s putting her resources toward bringing meals to those impacted by COVID-19. The crisis is a stark light on the racial injustices seen throughout the country, as a disproportionate number of Black and Latino Americans have been and continue to be impacted by the virus. Food insecurities, both pre- and during COVID, also ravage these communities. “I see injustice, and I can’t just stand by,” says Sharma.
This most recent iteration of FoodtoEat is indicative of how Sharma’s path is entirely her own. She is not driven by a desire to turn her business into a solely scalable, capital-focused model, she says. That’s not what’s important to her. What’s important is the community impact. “We want to storytell. It is about impact and value.” It is the smaller wins that lead to grander systemic change. “We have to hold ourselves accountable. We have to hold others accountable. We have to hold organizations accountable.”
She continues: “If you don’t give with a genuine heart, you won’t get with a genuine heart.”
To learn more about Deepti Sharma and FoodtoEat, visit: deeptisharma.com and foodtoeat.com.
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