Coast Foods filling personal orders for residents

In an effort to combat the effects of the Coronavirus, a Coast business is helping out in a major way.

“We’ve got a bunch of food right here. So, we decided to open up to the public and this is what happened.” Gulf Coast Restaurant Group Co-Owner Kevin Fish is talking about the long line of cars you may have seen on Seaway Road in Gulfport. “It was longer to start with. People were here piling in an hour before we even said we were going to open.”

Coast Foods is a facility that supplies local restaurants, like Half Shell Oyster House, with food and other essential items.“They’ve closed down all of our restaurants other than to-go and we do only a small amount of business than we do when we have dine-in. Walmart, there’s not a single piece of meat on the shelves. There’s not a single loaf of bread.”

Coast resident Michael Fournier says after seeing the bare store shelves he had to get in line. “This is great. I’ve been to the grocery store to get toilet paper, ground meat and just other stuff we need, bread and couldn’t find it the last two or three days. I saw this online on Facebook and called last night and put my order in. It’s really helpful”

“It’s been way beyond our expectation. We’ve had to get a truck in every day but we have multiple trucks in this morning. We have 6,000 rolls of toilet paper and 510 pound box of hamburger. It’s just growing every day and we’re processing as many orders as we can. We’re expecting to process about 500 today,” said Fish.

With the domino effects of COVID-19 felt in our daily lives, Fish says he’s excited to help ease the pressure. “It’s a win-win-win. Our employees are getting to keep working. We get to pay them. We’ve got salary managers, we have hourly people working at the same time. The people here they’re waiting 20 minutes to get up here to me and another five minutes to get their order and they are car after car after car saying thank you so much for doing this we really appreciate that. So, it’s awesome.”

“It’s a huge relief. It takes a lot of stress off for you as far as worrying about what you’re going to eat for the next four or five days.”