Since the onset of the pandemic, Guy Fieri has been doing his part to support restaurant relief efforts as closures and state lockdown mandates affected service workers nationwide. In mid-March of 2020, he founded the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund to give grants to cooks, servers, and other restaurant professionals that were out of work due to COVID-19.
In a recent profile by The Hollywood Reporter, Guy Fieri opened up about what went on behind the scenes of the creation of the fund. Not only was it passion, but it was also fueled by his anger about nothing being down for those working in the service industry.
According to his own estimates, Guy believes that mom-and-pop restaurants like the ones featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives only had about 10 days of being closed until their money dried up. This is what inspired him to create the fund on his own, THR reported.
Guy asked his business manager for the contact information of CEOs of major corporations, such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos, so he could draft personal emails to each of them asking for donations. "I'm not into shaming people and telling who didn't donate, that's not my style," Guy told the outlet: "Jeff, by the way, didn't help us." Jeff Bezos became the richest person in the world by $20 million in August 2020, during the pandemic, and did donate large sums of money to other relief efforts like Feeding America.
He did say that major donations from PepsiCo, Uber Eats, and Procter & Gamble, were a huge help in his efforts. Since the creation of the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund, he has given away 43,000 grants at $500 each to those out of work.
