The People's Kitchen Blend and the Case for Earned Revenue

At 1149 South 9th Street in South Philadelphia, a kitchen that began handing out free meals in March 2020 now has its name on a bag of coffee. I bought one. I’m Harry Hayman, and in my post about it I said that coffee, community, commerce and compassion are four things I happen to be pretty fond of, and that ReAnimator Coffee and People’s Kitchen have somehow put all four in one bag. Yes, this is a long post about a bag of coffee. The coffee is the easy part. This is the longer version of what I wrote: what is in the bag, who stands behind it, why a product people can actually buy, tied to a community kitchen, keeps me talking, and the one part of the arrangement I do not know.

What Is in the Bag

The People’s Kitchen Blend is a light roast coffee that ReAnimator Coffee created in collaboration with The People’s Kitchen, a community kitchen in South Philadelphia. The clearest public description I could find is a listing on The Way to Coffee, a coffee discovery site that lists beans from roasters around the world. It names ReAnimator as the roaster, calls the coffee a light roast, and gives the flavor notes as brown sugar, red apple and raw honey. The description reads:

A light roast blend created in collaboration with The People’s Kitchen in Philadelphia. All proceeds from this blend support The People’s Kitchen and their work in Philadelphia. The People’s Kitchen makes and serves food with dignity, without stigma, and free to all who need it.

The listing also credits the art to Cat Park, a name that turns up again in ReAnimator’s history, which I will get to shortly. Two things in that description matter to me. The blend was made together with the kitchen, and the listing says where the proceeds go.

The Kitchen at 1149 South 9th Street

People’s Kitchen says on its home page that it uses food to empower, transform and heal the community through free, nutritious meals, gardening and education. Its Our Story page explains how it started. When neighbors pointed to a hunger and employment emergency during the pandemic, Chef Aziza Young, El Compadre Restaurant and 215 People’s Alliance launched the kitchen together in March 2020, and it still works out of the former home of El Compadre Restaurant in South Philadelphia.

The scale is the part that stays with me. The James Beard Foundation’s October 2020 profile counted 33,000 free meals distributed by that October. The kitchen’s own website now says it has distributed more than 350,000 meals, engaged more than 300 volunteers and turned 30 abandoned plots into vegetable gardens. It also welcomes school groups, vocational students and interns into the kitchen to learn about food justice, food waste and cooking.

Then there is the daily routine. PhillyVoice reported in January 2023 that the kitchen was serving 100 freshly cooked meals a day, handed out between 10 and 11 in the morning. Each day’s menu offered two meals, one vegetarian and one with meat, labeled for dietary restrictions, and past dishes included pork fried rice with sautéed black beans, braised turkey with greens and white beans, and turkey chili with squash and rice. Whatever was left at 11 went into a community fridge in front of the building, where people could take a meal as they walked by.

One sentence in that 2020 profile has stayed with me. It says that to stay in operation for the long term, the kitchen was looking for recurring donations and grants. That is an honest ask, and a familiar one across food relief. A bag of coffee is a different kind of ask. Nobody writes a check. They buy something many of us already buy.

A Roaster That Has Done This Before

ReAnimator says on its About page that it was born in 2010, roasting in the basement of a row home in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Its first café opened in 2013. Today all of its coffee is roasted at 310 West Master Street in South Kensington, inside a former elevator factory, and its locations page lists six cafés across the city: Fishtown, South Kensington, South Philly, West Philly, Port Richmond and Mt. Airy.

This is not the first time ReAnimator has put a cause in a bag. When the Eagles went to the Super Bowl in early 2023, PhillyVoice reported that ReAnimator was releasing a limited edition blend called Hurtscafe for $20 on its website, with $5 from every sale going to The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia. The same article said an earlier blend honoring Nick Foles raised more than $20,000 during the team’s 2018 Super Bowl championship run, and that the Hurtscafe packaging carried artwork from a local artist named Cat Park. The People’s Kitchen listing credits its art to a Cat Park too. So a bag that does a second job is not a new idea at ReAnimator.

Why Earned Revenue Keeps Me Talking

Anybody who knows me knows I have been going on about earned revenue for nonprofits for years. I want to be fair to everything else in the funding mix. Philanthropy matters, and so do grants, donations and government support. None of what follows is an argument against them. It is a question I have never been able to answer: why do we not spend just as much time helping nonprofits find ways to earn through actual business activity?

Start with the national picture. Independent Sector’s December 2025 report puts the typical nonprofit’s 2024 revenue at half private funding, 28 percent government funding, 18 percent earned revenue and 4 percent other. In the Nonprofit Finance Fund survey the report cites, 20 percent of nonprofits said they had revenue from sales, and only 5 percent named sales as one of their two largest sources. I have spent years being the guy who keeps bringing this up, and now I have a number to point to.

The Philadelphia picture comes from Pew’s analysis of local nonprofits’ IRS filings. The city’s nonprofits reported $48.5 billion in revenue, an amount equal to more than one third of the city’s gross domestic product, and Pew notes that nonprofits account for 30 percent of private employment here. Of that revenue, 84 percent came from the hospitals and universities known locally as eds and meds. The mix changes with size. For organizations with less than $250,000 in revenue, program services made up 25 percent of revenue, against 73 percent for organizations with $5 million or more. Donations, gifts and grants ran around 40 percent of revenue for the first three size groups and only 7 percent for the largest. Pew counts tuition and medical care as program services, so a university’s tuition bill is not a bag of coffee, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The pattern is still plain: smaller organizations lean far more on gifts and grants than the largest ones do.

A community kitchen that gives its meals away has an extra wrinkle. Ben Miller, who helped launch the kitchen, is quoted in the same James Beard Foundation profile: “My customers don’t pay but we’re still cooking good food for them.” The person in line pays nothing, which is the whole point, so the earning has to happen somewhere else. A bag of coffee moves it to people who are glad to pay for a good cup.

What I Do Not Know About This Arrangement

I said it in my post and I will say it again: I don’t know the financial details of this particular arrangement. The listing says all proceeds from the blend support People’s Kitchen and its work in Philadelphia, and I am passing along that sentence, not describing the terms behind it. ReAnimator’s 2023 blend told buyers a number, $5 a sale to a named fund. This one says all proceeds. What I can speak to is the approach, and I love it. It does not ask anyone to fill out a donation form. It asks them to buy good coffee from a Philadelphia roaster and, according to the listing, points the proceeds at a kitchen that feeds people for free.

Coffee Today, What Tomorrow

In my post I said the business guy in me immediately starts thinking about how we could do more of this. Coffee today, what tomorrow? Food products, merchandise, events, partnerships with restaurants and retailers. ReAnimator’s online shop already sells mugs, tote bags and shirts next to the coffee. I don’t know whether anything like that is planned for this partnership, and I am not suggesting it is. I am asking what the next version of this idea could be.

Feed Philly Coalition describes itself as a coalition of nonprofits, businesses, government, healthcare, education, agriculture, philanthropy and community leaders working together to build a stronger, healthier, more resilient regional food system. Nonprofits and businesses sit side by side in that first sentence, and that is why a bag of coffee gets me this excited. We have nonprofits doing important work all over Philadelphia, and we have businesses making things, selling things and serving customers every single day. What we need is more introductions between the two, and more products worth buying at the end of them.

So I did what my post asks you to do. I bought some coffee, I am supporting a local business, and I am helping support an organization that feeds people. Acta non verba. Actions, not words.

Sources and references

• The Way to Coffee: People’s Kitchen Blend listing
• People’s Kitchen Philadelphia: home page
• People’s Kitchen Philadelphia: Our Story
• James Beard Foundation: The People’s Kitchen is feeding Philadelphia (October 2020)
• PhillyVoice: The People’s Kitchen seeks volunteers to help cook free, daily meals (January 2023)
• ReAnimator Coffee: About us
• ReAnimator Coffee: Locations
• ReAnimator Coffee: online shop
• PhillyVoice: ReAnimator Coffee creates Jalen Hurts roast for Eagles’ Super Bowl run (January 2023)
• Independent Sector: Health of the U.S. Nonprofit Sector (December 2025)
• The Pew Charitable Trusts: Nonprofits Make Major Contributions to Philadelphia’s Economy (July 2025)
• Feed Philly Coalition