Helpful Plates caters to seniors with homemade meals at Southside Community Center

Kerry Edwards has long thought about opening a business to provide homemade, nutritious meals to senior citizens. The recent closures and changes brought about by the coronavirus pandemic prompted her to shift into high gear.

“We’ve been pushing it around for three, four months,” she said. “There’s a team of four of us, and we all work at senior facilities. I just saw the need for it.”

One spouse is often in a nursing home or other facility, and the other spouse is left at home, Edwards said. She said she would often see husbands come to facilities she worked in to visit their wives and have meals with them. But as access to assisted living centers, nursing homes and other facilities shut down, Edwards said she worried if those spouses left at home would have access to nutritious food.

“There’s a real need for seniors to have a balanced diet and eat right at a cost they can afford,” she said. “Right now we just want to focus on seniors. Nobody caters to the seniors.”

So Edwards and her friends launched Helpful Plates, which operates out of a commercial kitchen inside the Southside Community Center. “It was really hard to find a kitchen,” she said.

Edwards was working as a food service director, but stepped down from that to become a cook at Guardian Angels so she could devote more time to Helpful Plates. “I still work my regular job, too,” she said. “I do this on my days off and in the evenings.”

She met the other women involved in Helpful Plates at various facilities where she worked over the years. “We have a variety of cooks in the kitchen,” she said.

Sarah Hopkins-Whitford has known Edwards for years, and they used to work together. Edwards first approached her about Helpful Plates last fall, she said.

“I instantly wanted to jump on board,” she said. “I thought it was a brilliant idea.”

Hopkins-Whitford said Helpful Plates is an easy way for seniors to get healthy meals. “I’ve worked with seniors in retirement homes for years,” she said. “They’re not familiar with DoorDash and Uber Eats.”

The group’s website has not yet launched, but people can sign up to get weekly menus and place their orders by sending an email to helpfulplates@gmail.com or by calling (509) 434-4303. There are three options for each day: a heavier meal, a lighter meal or 14 ounces of soup. Each option comes with a dessert and a roll or a biscuit. The meals are $8.95 each and the soup is $5.75. People can also order a pan of pasta for $12.

Helpful Plates launched the week before Easter, preparing 80 Easter meals. “It ran really smooth,” Edwards said.

Since then things have been steadily increasing. Many people are ordering four or five meals at a time, and the soup and pasta pan options are also popular, Edwards said. The meals are fresh and can be frozen if not used within three days. There are heating instructions on each package, and the trays they come in are microwave safe.

Hopkins-Whitford said she and Edwards do a lot of the cooking themselves. Another woman specializes in baked goods. “Everybody has their own task,” she said.

People can also request food be altered to fit dietary needs, including low sodium and diabetic friendly diets. Food can also be pre-cut into bite-sized pieces if requested. Almost everything is homemade.

“These are really nice meals,” Edwards said. “We make sure they have a balanced meal. We bake our breads, our desserts.”

Orders placed by 5 p.m. on Monday can be delivered on Tuesday or picked up at the Southside Community Center on Wednesday. People who pick up their meals don’t have to get out of their car, she said. “They just pull up by the trailer, give us their name, and we have it ready to go,” she said.

Orders that come in during the week are delivered on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. “We’re trying to keep the cost down,” Edwards said. “There’s no delivery fee unless we end up going out to their house twice in a week.”

Deliveries made with no contact. People leave their payment in an agreed-upon spot outside and Edwards or someone else will put the meal on their porch, then call to say it has been dropped off. “We make sure we see them open the door and take it,” she said.

The group got about 30 pickup orders the first week in addition to the delivery orders. Edwards is pleased her efforts to provide nutritious food to seniors is working.

“There’s never going to be more of a need than there is now,” she said.