Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Luciano Ciorciari. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Luciano, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?
a. My parents lived their lives gracefully walking the balance between fighting for more and appreciating everything they had. They instilled in my brothers and I an incredible dedication to our dreams and intense love for family that has since become the very foundation of what Food Related stands for. They taught us that tough times are an opportunity to rebuild something greater. That family is more than those who share your last name, but all those that bring love to your life and stand with you through it all. There are countless stories I could tell of how they impacted me, but at the end of all those stories is the simple but powerful lesson that if we live a life of integrity and love, the rest will fall into place.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
a. Food Related began in 1992 as Gaucho Gourmet, an online store my father, Manuel started to sell mostly Yerba Mate tea. The idea took off, and soon, he had customers across the country, not just in San Antonio where we are. He expanded the inventory to include specialty foods and imports from Europe and South America. For a while, he even had a beautiful little market in San Antonio. Between the website and storefront, my dad had built a family of over 10,000 customers by the time he passed in 2007.
Over the course of the next few years, my brothers and I left our long term careers to take over his venture. I ran luxury hotels and high-end restaurants. Juan Manuel, a scientist who traveled the united states, and Raul, a IT project manager who worked world-wide. As local business continued to increase, we expanded into the wholesale market in San Antonio, then Austin and the Texas Hill Country soon after. The success of the wholesale expansion allowed us to move into our current warehouse in Schertz, TX and continue to grow our inventory beyond our original specialties.
We soon realized we needed to evolve. Our business was no longer just specialty foods. We knew we needed to reflect on the values our father started Gaucho with and taught us, but also our present and future. So in 2019, we were reborn as Food Related. At the center of our logo is a big heart with a subtle infinity sign behind it. That heart symbolizes our greatest asset – not the vast amount of food related items we supply – but the unquantifiable amount of love we offer. Food became more than just a product for us. It became the catalyst for us to engage people and serve them infinite love.
Shortly after our official Food Related brand launch on 02/02/2020, my dad’s birthday, we were hit with the first covid shutdown. Our business was all but gone overnight. Businesses were closing and letting people go everywhere we turned, and we were faced with the decision of whether we would do the same. We chose to fight, to focus on our family of employees instead. They fought right alongside us. We managed to pivot our entire business model over a week. Over the next few months, we launched a retail grocery service focused on affordable groceries with free home delivery or pickup. Simultaneously, we launched the “Love Drop Off” campaign, a community support program to help the employees of our restaurant clients who lost their jobs. Together with the support of our customers, we were able to use our overstock product to create meal kits to distribute to restaurant workers across San Antonio and Austin. We were determined not to let a single item go to waste, and we gave away nearly 250,000 pounds of food.
The Love Drop Off quickly evolved beyond the needs of our customers and their employees and into anyone in our community who needed help. Through this effort, we were able to begin work with government agencies to provide nutritious and cost-effective food for a wide variety of programs.
As restrictions eased, society opened back up, and the new normal began to settle in, many of our restaurant clients thankfully opened back up and are thriving again.
And today, Food Related has certainly evolved. We are an integrated food center where chefs, home cooks, and government agencies across Texas can find what they need.
We are the place where you can Shop where Chefs shop. For Wholesale, we offer over 2000 product, deliver in our trucks across Texas and can ship across the nation.
For Retail, we offer mixed experience of Gourmet Market and Costco style volume buying experience with great saves. We do free home-delivery in the vicinities of San Antonio, Flat-Rate Shipping in Texas, and ship regularly across the country.
For Non-Profit and Government agencies, we offer a wide variety of commodity style items in full truck load volume and also work with each agency to customize their particular needs when necessary.
But ultimately, our purpose is to serve the world with unquantifiable love, always keeping the customer’s best interest at heart. Because at the end of the day, we won’t be remembered by the number of boxes we deliver, but rather by how much how much love we put back into the world around us. And that is a selfless Love that always puts others before themselves. Because that’s what the world is truly starving for.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
a. When we officially launched Food Related in February of 2020, our dream was to build an integrated platform where everyone from home cooks to executive chefs could find what they needed. We released a basic version of the website, but it was intended to be the foundation on which to build the rest. At that time, our main source of revenue was the restaurant and hospitality industry. As we all know, the world changed dramatically just the following month in March of 2020 with the first of many lockdowns. We lost 95% of our business over the span of a weekend.
Our team showed up on a Monday morning, and we had a decision to make. Send them home to find another job and try to wait it out ourselves, or go all in as a team, as a family, to find another way forward. We knew it was an all or nothing effort, and so did the team. We had an online platform, delivery trucks, drivers, a warehouse full of food, and a team who did not want to turn off the lights. We put a circle of chairs in the front of our warehouse, pulled out every whiteboard and laptop and crazy idea we had, and we got to work. The love in that room was palpable. It was the true love we had for what we do that kept us dreaming and allowed us to never give up. Within 5 days, we had completed the work we planned to do over the next 6 months by adapting our product line and service from hospitality to home grocery delivery and curbside pickup. Our community rallied behind us over the coming weeks, and at our peak, we did over 600 orders a day. We almost couldn’t keep up. There were even a few deliveries made around midnight that first big week of orders.
I remember how long those days were. Personally, I was leaving my house around 6 am and returning at 8 or 9 pm much of that year. My daughter, Aniella, started leaving me notes at night by the coffee machine so when I got up I could read them. One particular note had a drawing of our logo with the message “No matter the challenge, think love, because love will help you get through the day.” That message from her got myself and the team through many days and ended up framed around the warehouse as a simple reminder of why we’re there in the first place.
In theory, it would have been easier to turn off the lights and go home, try to wait for it all to pass. But that’s not the kind of person I am, nor my brothers or our team at Food Related. It was our collective fight to make it through the dark that was the true launch point for everything we have built since. Our dream of an integrated platform has finally become a reality, built on our father’s legacy, the lessons we learned during our expedited shove into the retail market, and the endless creativity and resilience of everyone at Food Related.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
a. I’ve said it already, but love truly is at the core of all we do. That’s why there’s a heart in the middle of our logo. Every move we make, every product sourced, and every customer interaction (positive or negative), is handled with love. We see every interaction as an opportunity to build a deeper connection. That is how we have done business from day one, the way our father taught us. We have had the blessing of an incredible team over the years that puts their whole heart in every day, who cares about the customer and their success and happiness as much as our own. We have a strong culture of honesty and communication, both internally and with our family outside our building. Our vision is to serve the world unquantifiable love. Food is our excuse to do that, but keeping that vision, that love at the heart of Food Related every day is what has allowed us to build such a reputation of dependability and partnership.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.foodrelated.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foodrelatedfam/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FoodRelatedFam
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/foodrelated/