Head of City Fresh Foods Nurtures People, Elevates Profits

Banner photo by William Felker on Unsplash

Sheldon Lloyd believes business can be a force for good that brings people together. He specifies, however, that “it’s got to be local.”

City Fresh Foods—the catering business Sheldon’s brother, Glynn Lloyd (CAS’90), founded in 1994—has for more than a quarter-century embodied good and local. They create culturally appropriate meals that are made from scratch right in Boston by a workforce that is mostly local and largely representative of the communities they serve—Black, Hispanic, and immigrant—and deliver them to senior and childcare centers.

As City Fresh Foods CEO since 2015, Sheldon Lloyd (’84, Questrom’86), developed his corporate chops in banking in the 1980s but has come to champion the vision his brother had: to embrace people alongside profits.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, City Fresh roughly doubled its production and delivered 20,000 meals per day to food access sites throughout the city at a time when vulnerable populations, including the elderly, were unable to go out. That year, the business announced it would begin to transfer ownership of City Fresh to its nearly 150 employees through a stock purchase option, yet another reason it has developed a reputation in Boston for nourishing both stomachs and community. And beginning in July, City Fresh began providing breakfast, lunch, after-school meals, fresh snacks, and summer meals for all Boston Public Schools—a contract worth a projected $17 million over three years.

“Employee ownership…is building wealth and equity,” Sheldon says. “Who gives employees a chance to do that? Most of the capitalistic way is, ‘I’m going to get mine. I’m going to take care of my family and me.’ That’s never been the MO here because we think that it will help elevate the company, but also help elevate the community.”

A Winding Path to CEO

Sheldon Lloyd grew up in leafy, upper-middle-class Sharon, Mass., following his parents’ move from Boston in the 1960s. His exposure to diverse communities in the majority white town came mainly through its tiny Jewish and Black populations, his high school’s participation in the METCO program—a voluntary desegregation program where Black students from Boston are bused to mainly white suburban high schools—and summers playing tennis at Sportsmen’s Tennis & Enrichment Center in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. As a teenager, Lloyd started a landscaping business that his brother, Glynn—who is three-and-a-half years younger—would later take over and grow exponentially. It was, perhaps, the earliest foreshadow of their later business partnership.

Lloyd chose to attend BU—where his dad worked in admissions at the Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine. He lived off campus, in a Beacon Street brownstone and found a group of friends who enjoyed concerts and parties. He eventually settled on studying business, with a finance concentration.

Leaving BU with a business degree at the height of the 1980s, Lloyd seemed destined for Wall Street. With an internship at the newly formed Bank of New England under his belt, he gained valuable experience as a mutual fund accountant at State Street Bank, worked for Kodak throughout the Northeast as a manufacturing salesperson, and even ran, for a time, the Lloyd brothers’ landscaping company—which Glynn had grown from about 15 to 80 accounts since they were teenagers.

By now, Glynn had also started City Fresh Foods, which began as a takeout lunch business in Nubian Square (formerly Dudley Square) and had quickly expanded, delivering fresh, ethnically relevant Meals on Wheels to homebound seniors throughout Boston. In 1996, while working out of his apartment and cooking in a 1,200-square-foot commercial kitchen, Glynn called Lloyd and asked him to come run a new City Fresh Foods concession service at WBZ-TV’s headquarters. Lloyd came in as a part-owner and never looked back. He started to manage the finance and administration, while Glynn managed operations and was the public face of the company. Under the brothers’ leadership, City Fresh steadily became Boston’s go-to meal provider for homebound seniors, community centers, and, by the early 2000s, charter schools that were popping up all over the city.

“We worked together day-to-day for 18 years,” Lloyd says. “And we’re brothers, and I’m older, so sometimes it was difficult because he was the CEO—he was the boss.”

Toward a Worker-Owned Model

When his brother moved on from daily involvement with the business in 2015, Lloyd became the boss. The company had moved into a new, 15,000-square-foot headquarters in Roxbury, had begun operating senior meal programs in Lynn and on Cape Cod, and was bringing in profits annually.

On June 19, 2020, Lloyd announced that the brothers had bought out the company’s investor-shareholders and would transition ownership to its workers through an employee stock purchase plan. The date of the announcement was intentional. June 19, or Juneteenth, is the day Americans commemorate the final emancipation of African American slaves. Lloyd sees City Fresh’s employee stock purchase plan as a way to build wealth among a workforce that is approximately 95 percent people of color—many of them immigrants—which is freeing for many. A 2015 study from the Federal Reserve of Boston found that the median net worth of a white household in Boston is approximately $250,000, while a Black family’s net worth is just $8, on average.

“Our whole model is Boston and being in the city, but it’s tough, because [a lot of my staff] is getting gentrified out,” Lloyd says. “You’ve got growth, but you’ve got to keep people here who helped build the city. You’ve got to keep them here, but you’ve got to plan for it.”

Two years later, approximately 30 City Fresh Foods workers have taken the stock purchase plan, making the company more than 90% minority-owned for the first time since Glynn started catering meals out of a Roxbury kitchen in 1994. With its new, $17 million contract to feed nearly 50,000 public school children in Boston, City Fresh’s value has never been higher—good news for both school kids and City Fresh’s staff.

“Despite everything that’s going on in the crazy world, this makes me feel good coming to work,” Lloyd says. “I think about who we feed, and I think about what we’re building here, and it keeps me going after all these years.”