'Meal for a Meal' Initiative by Mango Chili Helps Underprivileged Children by Feeding Them

Mango Chili, which opened this year in Bangsar South, is a restaurant with a mission. Under its ‘Meal For A Meal’ initiative, this Thai eatery contributes one meal to an underprivileged child for every meal consumed by a customer here.

We speak to Mango Chili’s ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ Ronald Khoo to discover the inspiration behind his work and his goals to give back to society through the F&B sector.

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Eat Drink: What was your inspiration for ‘Meal For A Meal’? What made you decide to tie a restaurant business so directly to a social responsibility effort?

Ron: I have been in the F&B line since 2000 – always in the wine business and had a fine dining establishment for awhile also. So, it’s not difficult to figure out that my passion is in Wine & Food. Mango Chili kind of landed on my lap (as my friend owns the Bangkok company) and the offer was quite attractive.

It was also at the time when I met Dylan Wilk who’s now one of my pillars of strength. Dylan’s was once England’s 9th richest man. He realised very quickly that money didn’t bring happiness and he was fortunate enough to realise his calling early on in life to actually leave all that fame and now he runs a business in Manila called Human Nature which impacts the poor community and is doing its part to make this world a better place to live in.

He inspired me to change how I looked at business and my promise was to do just that when i next had the chance to. So when the chance to start a scalable and regional (as i have the master franchise rights for Malaysia, Singapore & Indonesia) restaurant brand landed on my lap, I decided to incorporate social impact metrics into the business – the first was the easy one where for every meal sold, Mango Chili will feed a child in need.

Our second impact initiative is to hire up to a maximum of 50% of our staff from poor communities – it doesn’t matter what their background is, we will mentor and train them to achieve a better standard of living.  Finally, our third is to eventually integrate some of our supply chain to poor communities – we are now testing a plot with SEMOA who does outreach to the Orang Asli community.  I now call this project the “Food for Good” project as I intend to branch out into other complimentary areas of food doing good.

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Eat Drink: Could you clarify the mechanics of Meal For A Meal – for every meal purchased at Mango Chili, a meal is provided for an underprivileged child. Which organisations do you work with for this?

Ron: Firstly, how we define a meal is by the average spend of our customers. Although our current average customer spend is at RM28 now, we have not changed our definition of a meal at Mango Chili yet – a meal is still defined as RM20 spent. So each time a customer spends RM20, we consider this as a meal and we will allocate one meal to a child in need.

There are three ways we distribute meals to children in need:
1) We fund a kitchen which cooks meals for children in need. This was the case in the first community we supported “Dignity for Children Foundation” – they have a kitchen in their learning centre and the children in need have their one healthy meal there every day.

2) We send raw ingredients to a kitchen which cooks meals for children in need.  We are exploring this next option with an orphanage in PJ and if this works out, we will send raw ingredients there on a weekly basis.

3) We cook the meals and deliver it daily. This is a more taxing way to do things but we envisage that we will meet a community that will require us to do this one day. As we grow, we will also have a central commissary and it will be fairly easy for us to do this.

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Eat Drink: Do you have an estimate for how many meals for children have been provided since the restaurant opened earlier this year?

Ron: As at October 24, the figure was 24,181 meals.

Eat Drink: Have the meals been channeled to children just in Malaysia, or also to those in other countries regionally?

Ron: As we are at infant stage now and still learning to do this, we are focusing on local needs first.

Eat Drink: How much is the estimated cost of a meal for a child?

Ron: It ranges from as low as RM2 to as high as RM7 (if it’s a baby/young child). This doesn’t take into account logistics and our staff time cost yet.

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Eat Drink: Could you outline any future plans you have to expand the Meal For A Meal initiative? What has the public response been so far to this initiative – do you feel it has helped to increase your number of customers because people want to support the restaurant’s effort? And do you have any more similar social responsibility projects in the pipeline in connection to the restaurant industry?

Ron: Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is to be able to grow to a level where our group can feed 10 million children in need per year. We do not intend to have an expiry date for this initiative. You can expect to see local and regional growth, possibly new brands and new innovative food retail products coming under the Food for Good umbrella.

We have been terrible at our marketing and social media as we don’t have the money to hire someone to specialise in this yet. So, not many people know of what we do. Many customers are surprised when we tell them at the end of the dinner that they have helped feed a number of kids tonight. This surprise turns into a good feeling, and we have had repeat customers; some turned their corporate lunch or dinners into a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative. So we are very grateful for this.

I dont’ think this really brings in any extra customers. For a particular vino and foodie like me, I still think it boils down to the basics – the food must be good, the service must be good before anything else. I don’t expect people to eat at Mango Chili and excuse poor food quality just because we are helping a good cause.

The Food for Good project must always be a “by the way…” thing and not a “because we do this you need to come eat here..”  I’m hoping that we will eventually get our food quality level to where I want it to be and that it stays there from then on.

I have so many ideas in my head now but I just can’t execute them all. I have a few other projects in my mind and I’m just hoping that Mango Chili will be able to take on a growth of its on eventually and free me to incubate another “….for Good” project!

Find: Mango Chili directory listing here.

See Also: Mango Chili Thai Cafe at Nexus, Bangsar South: Restaurant Review
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