The list of items Alltown Fresh made available for curbside pickup soon after stay-at-home orders were issued didn’t look a lot like the typical convenience-store order. These premade food boxes included produce and protein kits accompanied with recipes and instructions to give consumers—people who were trying to avoid crowds and long lines at grocery stores—the basics they needed to fix a healthy meal at home.

“We asked ourselves: What are our guests going to need?” says Chef Joshua Smith, director of culinary innovation for Alltown Fresh, a retail division of Global Partners. “I reached out to our distributors who serve restaurants, [and] we started aggregating as much product as we could.”

The effort extended well beyond the spring. This fall and winter, Alltown Fresh continued the effort with Thanksgiving and holiday meal kits to relieve some of the stress of holidays overshadowed by the coronavirus.