“I’m an ambitious guy,” said Isaiah Bostic, owner of Batter On Deck, a SE Portland food cart known for its creative battered eats. Isiah’s ambition is obvious—he opened a business in the initial throes of COVID.
Batter on Deck will receive free advertisement from Effectv to draw more customers and boost sales.
The food cart has been a dream of his for a long time. One of the many people unemployed due to COVID, he took the opportunity to open Batter on Deck, a seemingly perfect business model for a pandemic. Food always made to-go and spacious outdoor seating should have been pandemic-proof. But even the most COVID-ready businesses struggled this past year.
“We couldn’t open because we didn’t have gloves,” said Bostic. “Masks were hard to come by. One distributor told us it would take a year to get supplies.”
Closing even one day is a risk for a new business, but food safety came first for Bostic and they didn’t reopen until they had everything necessary to serve food again.
The Comcast RISE grant will help Bostic make it through this so he can go on to achieve his goals. He hopes to someday have his signature “Tornado Potato” – a fried potato on a stick smothered with everything you could possibly dream of – on grocery store shelves and in baseball stadiums. Comcast RISE aims to help BIPOC-owned businesses see it through these tough times so that they can go on to thrive in the years ahead.
