Here's how the city has fed more than 38,000 migrants since 2022

In October 2022, Gerardo Abreu volunteered to help feed the busloads of migrants arriving in the city.

He’s the co-owner of Sabe a Zulia, a Venezuelan restaurant in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood.

Before long, “we figured out how to cook on a budget for tons of people,” Abreu said in Spanish. “One idea was rice with shredded chicken mixed in and a simple salad.”

While this was routine kitchen work for Abreu, for the city of Chicago, feeding thousands of migrants living in the roughly two dozen temporary shelters over the last year and a half has been a complicated task.

Since August 2022, Chicago has welcomed more than 38,000 migrants, the majority from Venezuela. The city has outsourced the feeding operation and the food handling to several vendors.

Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

And while city officials say they want these vendors to offer healthy, nutritious and culturally relevant meals, mixed reviews from migrants paint a different picture. Many newcomers say they will eat anything, but some complained the food was old, cold or too spicy, according to formal complaints filed by shelter residents.

The city has paid about $31.3 million to feed migrants between August 2022 and February 2024, according to the city’s dashboard. In addition, the Greater Chicago Food Depository, using state and private funds, also has spent more than $17.6 million to feed migrants during much of that period.

In January, the city selected two new catering agencies, Seventy-Seven Communities and a group called 14 Parish, as the main caterers. The Food Depository had hoped to be chosen to continue providing food in shelters, but city officials said the two agencies offered better meal prices per person compared to what they were previously paying, while still maintaining the food quality.

Trying to offer nutritious, culturally relevant food

Chicago’s food suppliers have learned many lessons about the tastes of people coming from South America.

“How do you create a menu that offers choice and dignity and all the needed components in a way that would be received?” asked Amy Laboy, vice president of programs and community partnerships for the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

The food bank provided meals for new arrivals for more than a year. Its involvement started when buses first started arriving from Texas, offering migrants food upon arrival and later at police stations that served as temporary shelters. By the end of 2023, the food bank was providing food to up to 21 shelters along with 17 mostly Black- and Latino-owned caterers it hired.

The depository provided about two million meals at around $6 to $8 per dish. About 18,000 daily meals came from vendors, and 2,000 meals were prepared in the food depository’s kitchen.

“We were definitely providing dishes that involved rice and chicken,” Laboy said. They provided two hot meals per day, plus fruit, cereal, oatmeal, granola bars, milk and coffee for breakfast.

Laboy said throughout the process vendors gathered feedback from shelters and tweaked the menus based on people’s preferences.

Rhodel Castillo, the co-owner of Garifuna Flava, a Caribbean-style restaurant in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood, was one of the vendors hired by the food depository last summer.

But even for Castillo, who is Belizean and shares some cultural similarities with Venezuelans, there was a learning curve. Sometimes migrants were unfamiliar with certain dishes, so he tweaked his recipes. He came up with a basic barbecue sauce not on his regular menu.

He spent time strategizing meal options and getting feedback from shelter staff if a particular dish wasn’t as popular. He focused on what migrants enjoyed.

“We bought several 100 pounds of rice for a week, several 100 pounds of beans per week,” Castillo said. “Tons and tons of fried plantains.” He said Venezuelans loved his Belizean brown-stew chicken.

Ketchup on spaghetti is popular — and he realized they needed “plenty of mayo.”

“We were literally buying buckets and buckets of mayo,” he said.

Once meals were delivered to the shelters, staff members hired by a private Kansas-based company were in charge of storing the meals and serving them based on instructions provided by the food vendors.

But some food vendors said kitchen staffers didn’t always follow instructions on how to store the food. They said there was a revolving door of shelter employees, and many were overworked. That situation made it difficult for food caterers to communicate with shelter staffers on how to handle food properly and get feedback or an accurate count of migrants at each shelter.

“Sometimes [staffers] didn’t really clean all that well,” said a restaurant owner who didn’t want to be identified.

Laboy said she learned there is a balance between wanting to offer nutritious food and offering what people are used to eating back home — whether those options are considered healthy or not.

“Individuals do want some burgers rotated into meals that they might have,” Laboy said. “But they absolutely would still want some of those more traditional dishes from home.”

Adriana Cardona-Maguigad covers immigration for WBEZ.