Byron Kern, co-owner of Well & Good Brewing Company in North Yarmouth, traces his charitable business ethic back to the early 2000s, when he was working at a Whole Foods in Illinois.

“The CEO once said – and this really stuck with me – that he didn’t see any reason a for-profit company couldn’t do all the good things a not-for-profit does, and potentially more, because they’re generating more income,” he said.

Kern soon went on to grad school at Notre Dame in Indiana, where good works were also highly valued. “Something like 80 percent of the student body does charitable work,” he said. “It’s not a requirement. It’s just part of the culture.”

After grad school, Kern took a series of corporate positions as a product and brand manager, work he found unfulfilling. “Working corporate jobs is fairly soulless. You’re always chasing profit margins. I really got burned out on that, and I wanted to do something where I felt like I was making a difference, in addition to earning a living.”

In July, Kern – an avid home brewer for more than 20 years – and his wife, Elise, did just that when they launched Well & Good, a camp-vibes brewery housed in a log cabin-style former home on Cumberland Road.

“At Notre Dame, they were big on the concept of ‘Do good while you’re doing well,'” Kern said. “And that’s actually where our name comes from – Well & Good is drink well and do good.”

The Kerns built Well & Good’s business model around giving. The brewery spotlights two Maine charitable causes each month, and designates one bin for each in their taproom. Customers receive a token with their beer and place the token in whichever bin they want their contribution to go toward. Fifty cents of each pint Well & Good sells goes to charity (and $1 per pint for the brewery’s 60 Halo & Crown Club members, who pay $65 for the year and receive discounts on beer and merchandise, and also vote on which charities are featured).

In November, Well & Good is giving to Cumberland’s Friends of Prince Memorial Library and the Greely PTO. Since the brewery launched, it’s donated more than $3,000 to local organizations including Finally Home Senior Dog Rescue and Retirement Home in North Yarmouth, Maine Boys to Men, Best Buddies Maine, ICan Bike Camp, Hart Cat Shelter of Maine and Cumberland Wood Bank.

Kern said he’s heartened to see how common charitable giving is among Maine’s breweries. Bissell Brothers, Brickyard Hollow, Maine Beer Company and Rising Tide are just some of the brewers with robust community-based giving programs. Allagash – which has a charitable giving mandate as a B Corp – donated $600,000 to community causes in 2023 alone.

But many restaurants and coffee shops are also admirably generous with their time, money and resources, regularly giving back to the community with monetary or in-kind donations.

“Maine is a place that people are really in love with and proud to be a part of – it’s a very community-focused place in my experience,” Kern said. “Giving back to the local community seems to be baked into what it is to be a Mainer.”

Tom Ruff, founder and CEO of East Bayside’s gluten-free Orange Bike Brewing Company, which has raised hundreds of thousands for charity since 2023, is another transplanted Midwesterner who recognizes this special quality.

“Maine has a values-centric ethos,” Ruff said. “Mainers remind me a lot of the folks back home where I’m from in Indiana. Good, hard-working, humble people. But at the end of the day, when someone’s in need, the community jumps in to support, no questions asked.”

THOUSANDS OF FREE HOLIDAY MEALS

As the holidays approach, the spirit of giving kicks into overdrive in the local food and beverage industry. Some of the fastest-growing charitable efforts with the most immediate impact are the free Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve dinners put out by Taj Indian Cuisine in South Portland and the multi-restaurant holiday meals organized by Old Port’s Crispy Gai.

Taj owner Sai Guntaka launched his restaurant’s non-traditional holiday to-go meals program in 2020 as a way to help the homeless and disadvantaged during the pandemic. Taj has people phone or send in an email request for a certain number of meals, noting whether they’d prefer vegetarian, and then they can pick them up at a specified time, no questions asked. They also receive a number of email requests on behalf of homeless people. Some people aren’t able to pick up the meals, so a few regular Taj customers – including Ruff, from Orange Bike Brewing – volunteer each year to help deliver food.

The first year, Taj gave out roughly 200 meals. Last year, they served about 960. Guntaka expects to serve as many as 1,500 free holiday to-go meals this year, and started promoting the effort on social media early this year and set up a dedicated email address: tajholidaymeals@gmail.com – to take meal requests.

The Taj meals include naan bread, an appetizer such as pakora, mains such as tikka masala, chicken curry, saag paneer or vegetable korma and often a dessert such as mango custard.

“People don’t expect usually to get everything. They probably think they’ll just be getting an entree,” said Guntaka, who also feeds some local homeless people almost daily through Taj, sometimes for both lunch and dinner. “We do it fully so they can be satisfied.”

“We have a lot of people coming in giving us hugs and crying,” he continued. “We get a few emails saying that they didn’t know what to do or what they could have done (without the meals), so that makes us feel good, to know that we are really helping them out. The community has been a great support for us, so we just like to give it back to the community.”

Taj is open on Thanksgiving, when the restaurant puts out more than 500 meals for paying customers. Because of the added workload, staffers stay as late as midnight prepping the night before, and come in as early as 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving to continue working on the meals. Guntaka’s family, including his mother, who is the head chef at Taj, celebrate Thanksgiving with the staff at a meal before or after dinner service.

Crispy Gai has been organizing and distributing free holiday meals since 2021, the year the restaurant opened. “We’re seeing a lot of people struggling to get a hot meal on the holidays,” said co-owner Jordan Rubin. “It’s hard for a lot of people every day, but it’s magnified on the holidays to have a meal and not have to worry about where it’s coming from.”

Like Taj, Crispy Gai has a no-questions-asked policy. “We feel if you are in a position to ask, then we’re in a position to give,” said chef and co-owner Cyle Reynolds. “There’s no real scrutiny. My hope is that the people in the most need are the ones reaching out to us, but we don’t turn anyone away.”

Crispy Gai partners with other local restaurants on the project, and has worked in the past with venues including Leeward, Chaval, Tandem Coffee and Bakery and The Honey Paw. This year, Crispy Gai will prepare fried chicken, while Mr. Tuna provides a starch side, Regards takes care of the veggies and Bread & Friends makes dessert. They also partner with CarHop to deliver the food at no charge.

Last year, the Crispy Gai coalition served more than 500 Thanksgiving meals. “We’ve seen growth every year, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit somewhere close to 700 this year,” Reynolds said.

‘THE PLACES THAT CAN, DO’

Karl Deuben, owner of The East Ender, volunteered last year to help pack meals at Crispy Gai along with his wife, Hilary , and sons Jackson, 16, and Walker, 13. His family will be on hand to help again this year.

“It’s nice to have some perspective on our relative privilege and start off the holiday with being thankful,” Deuben said. “It feels good.

“The last couple years have been challenging in general for those in our industry, and it can be hard to feel like you’re doing something that benefits the community,” he added. “Something like this brings it back to the spirit of why we got involved in hospitality.”

Crispy Gai and its sister restaurants, Bar Futo and Mr. Tuna, also help raise money throughout the year for local groups such as the Unified Asian Community of Maine and the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, along with efforts beyond Maine’s borders such as hurricane relief for Asheville, North Carolina, or the Southern Smoke Foundation, a fund that helps food and beverage industry workers in emergencies.

“We just try to give back where we can,” said Rubin, who is also chef-owner of Bar Futo and Mr. Tuna. “We like to support our community and other communities like ours. We’ve found that it all comes back around. We might be in a tough situation sometime when we need people to help us.”

While restaurant distributors sometimes help offset the cost of charitable meals by providing free or steeply discounted raw product, producing and distributing the meals still requires a major sacrifice of time and effort.

“The hardest thing is organizing it,” Deuben said. “I don’t think the public understands how much effort goes into that. I always admire people who have the gumption to do that and can pull it off.”

Not all restaurants are in a position to be charitable right now.

“Like we’ve seen, there have been a lot of restaurants closing,” Reynolds said. “If you’re not taking care of the people in your four walls, it’s not reasonable to expect to be giving. I know the places that can, do.”

Coffee By Design, a former B Corp that opted not to renew its certification, has given an estimated $1 million to charitable organizations since it launched in 1994. “We’ve been very consistent in our giving since the very beginning when we opened our doors on Congress Street,” said owner and co-founder Mary Allen Lindemann. “Our mantra has always been progressive arts and social change.”

In addition to the national and international causes the company supports, Coffee By Design also regularly helps local groups like Spurwink behavioral health and education services, the Olympia Snowe Women’s Leadership Institute and the Indigo Arts Alliance.

Moreover, Coffee By Design sets aside $1 for every pound sold of its Rebel Blend coffee. The company’s staff chooses five Maine-based artists or arts groups each year from a list of applicants and awards them Rebel Blend Fund grants, which have totaled more than $150,000 since the program started in 1998.

Lindemann reviews Coffee By Design’s charitable contributions closely every year to evaluate their impact. “I would say 99 percent of the time, where our money is spent is viewed as an excellent investment,” she said.

COMPASSION FOR COMMUNITY

Orange Bike is working toward its B Corp certification, and Ruff surely has the charitable giving requirement covered.

In 2023, at an Orange Bike fundraiser at his home in Cape Elizabeth, Ruff raised $120,000 to benefit the Quality Housing Coalition’s Project Home Trust, which gives cash assistance to single Maine mothers struggling with housing and childcare costs. The brewery raised more than $97,000 from a July event for the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition.

Ruff said he’s struck by how common the drive to help others is around Maine, particularly in the hospitality industry.

“Maine has a strong sense of community, and a fundamental cultural value is placed on supporting one another,” he said. “Maine breweries, coffee shops and restaurants recognize that when the community thrives, we all do. The pandemic also underscored this. It pushed many of us to reassess our role as business owners and the impact we want.”

Big Tree Hospitality – a restaurant group that includes Eventide and The Honey Paw – donates plenty of gift certificates to charity events such as silent auctions, and supports dozens of charitable causes and local schools, including Full Plates Full Potential, EqualityMaine, Maine Needs and Deering and Scarborough high schools. They also throw fundraiser dinners to benefit some of the environmental conservation and preservation causes they feel most strongly about.

Big Tree does an annual lobster bake on The Goslings islands by Harpswell to benefit the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, for instance, and a winter charity dinner at Stratton Brook Hut to raise money for Maine Huts and Trails.

“We don’t have to give cash,” said Big Tree Hospitality co-owner and General Manager Arlin Smith. “(The charity group) can pay for the food at cost, and then we’re donating all of our time and outreach to fill those seats and raise that money. It’s an awesome way to do outreach that isn’t us reaching into our pockets, which are shallow.”

Many local restaurants donate a portion of proceeds from a particular menu item to their cause of choice, a straightforward, transparent approach that helps customers participate. LB Kitchen donates $1 to a rotating charity from every sale of their Community Bowl, a grain and bean bowl with optional protein add-ins.

“It’s part of the brand to give back to community,” said LB Kitchen co-owner Bryna Gootkind, noting that the Community Bowl program grew out of LB’s participation in Cooking for Community during the pandemic. “The organizations we select definitely reflect both the brand mission and us personally as the owners of the business. I’m a lesbian and we have employees who are transgender, so it’s important to support EqualityMaine and Maine TransNet, for instance.”

LB Kitchen also donates regularly to Maine Needs and Project Relief. Gootkind estimates the Community Bowl project has raised more than $5,000 for their chosen groups.

“It’s such a tiny offering in the end,” she said. “For a restaurant to donate any money at all is challenging. But I feel a responsibility to contribute because LB Kitchen has become a real sort of pillar in the community, and a space that is very much for the community.”

Gootkind said that as LB Kitchen opens its space in Rock Row in Westbrook next year, they hope to have an even greater impact on the community. She said she’d like to partner with the neighboring Dempsey Center and New England Cancer Specialists, and have LB Kitchen offer cooking programs that teach people to prepare healthy meals.

“Hospitality people are big-hearted people in general,” Rubin said. “It’s just in our nature to want to help, to comfort and feed others.

“And it’s kind of ingrained in our culture here to help people when we can,” he added. “That compassion is a big part of what makes Portland and Maine so special.”

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