Seema

Deepti Sharma, 33, grew up in a family that lived on North Indian cuisine. Her parents own the well-known Indian eatery Amma, a small, ochre-colored restaurant that chef Padma Lakshmi says is amongst the most authentic places to put North India in your mouth in New York. Sharma herself runs a unique immigrant, women, and POC-focused delivery business , the catering concierge service called FoodtoEat. The delivery service craftily partners only with restaurants owned by immigrants, women, and people of color – “folks like me,” she said.

The service offers help to small mom-and-pop restaurants by getting them catering gigs at corporate events, ranging from a 300-person team-lunch to a private dinner party, forcing the companies, in turn, to bring diversity and inclusion into their business. Sharma states that her business is “mission-based,” which means that it is who the restaurants are, and not what they serve, that matters to her more. “Our restaurants come from a diverse set of backgrounds, because I am a first-generation immigrant and an Indian American woman of color. To me it’s really important to represent those businesses because oftentimes opportunities don’t come their way,” she said.