in the last three months the covid19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown has taken a bad hit on many service industries in india amongst the worst affected are restaurants that had to shut operations to slow the speed of the virus for a sector that is valued at usd 4 billion with the national restaurant association of india counting more than 500000 restaurants as members the virus spells disaster in more ways than one apart from food supply interruptions restaurants are now facing strict restrictive conditions for reopening after months of being shuttered down these new norms are limiting restaurant capacity due to social distancing and most businesses are operating on waferthin margins and unprecedented cash flow a lot of workers have also lost jobs and are in dire need of support and security to stabilize their lives at a pivotal time like this beverage brand pepsi has come out with a meaningful initiative to help restaurants adjust to the new normal it recently announced the pepsisaveourrestaurants initiative a fundraising campaign in association with national restaurant association of india nrai and leading online food delivery aggregator swiggy with cause at the heart of it the initiative aims at providing approximately 25 million meals to the workers of the restaurant community who are in distressbuy a soft drink support a mealthe pepsisaveourrestaurants initiative encourages consumers to support restaurants workers with a simple step whenever a consumer adds any soft drink to hisher meal order on swiggy from june 25 2020 to july 19 2020 pepsi will contribute a part of the proceeds for every soft drink ordered to the nrai covid19 relief corpus this fund will be further used to provide meals dry ration to restaurant workers who are suffering due to these challenging times what makes the campaign unique is that the offer is not restricted to just the purchase of pepsi but is also valid on any packaged soft drinks ordered from restaurants listed on swiggy platform which includes carbonated soft drinks packaged iced tea packaged juices and packaged juicebased drinks this step makes the campaign purely philanthropic and it can go a long way in helping businesses remobilize their operations and extend security to their workersspeaking about the initiative pepsico india spokesperson said the restaurant industry is an integral part of our ecosystem and has been severely impacted by the ongoing health challenge both restaurants and restaurant workers are struggling hence in our endeavour to find various meaningful ways to provide support to the ecosystem we found that mobilizing a movement with consumers and providing food security support to our restaurant workers and their families who are in distress is a timely intervention and need of the hour through pepsisaveourrestaurants we are committed to supporting the ones in need and are extremely thankful to swiggy and nrai for their support and partnership for this initiativecongratulationsyou have successfully cast your votelogin to view resultgrabbing eyeballs onlinethe initiative gave way to a lot of conversations on social media after celebrities