- [Evan] It's adapt, it's stay agile, it's always think about health first.

But then, just think about how you can integrate the people to keep those relationships strong because that's what it's all about.

(peaceful upbeat music) - My name is Evan Delahanty, and I'm the founder of Peaceful Fruits, a social good snack company based in Barberton, Ohio.

Peaceful fruits makes healthy, delicious fruit snacks like a fruit roll-up, we just actually make it out of fruit.

And while we make those, we're using ethically sourced, sustainable fruit from all over the world and particularly from the Amazon, where I was a Peace Corp volunteer.

And then here in Barberton, Ohio where we do our production, we're employing adults with disabilities to help us make every single snack.

It's definitely been a rollercoaster ride for us.

We are a food manufacturer, so we were deemed essential, so we stayed open.

But, because we employ adults with disabilities, they're at higher risk, both because of their living situations, and health concerns, and everything else, and we decided just slightly ahead of the lockdown, I believe, to really cut back and then to totally suspend the program once the lockdown went into place.

The downside is that, I say every snack is made by adults with disabilities, that has not been true for the last month.

For the community, it's not just the direct economic impact, it's the ripple effect.

And so when you shut down the programming for the adults with disabilities, the job coaches, the therapists, they get laid off.

So that's where there was a little silver lining both for us, and for them, because I said to them, "You're actually here in my operation every day, helping support the adults with disabilities do the job, while you're laid off from that other job, how about you come in and help do the job that you usually support?"

We were able to temporarily hire on those therapists that were otherwise out of work, to actually help us with production.

All of our physical distribution is way down, so stores have not for any number of reasons, been in a hurry to reorder.

Fortunately, online shopping went through the roof, and that's really what's kept us moving and honestly as part of this, even though sales are down in many cases, we made the decision to go through and give all of our regular workers a raise actually during this time just to say, "This is scary, we appreciate it, and we're all sharing in some of the risks, and we all have to support each other as best we can."

It's a tough time.

And as things are starting to open up, as some of our folks with disabilities and other people are starting to be willing to come back, do we want them to come back?

Do we think it's too early?

How do we manage that?

You don't want to deprive somebody of work, but you also don't want to introduce something where obviously if someone in our small community gets sick, then there goes everything.

It is tough on them.

We did a small fun thing where we sent home to all of our regular workers that aren't here right now a package of some fruit snacks and a note, just to kind of let them know that we're thinking about them and I think those small gestures in these times can mean a lot, whether it's your team, or your family, or whatever.

You got to be ready to reassure people as best we can, because there is a lot of uncertainty.

But, so far, we are as set as we can be to weather the storm.

It's not smooth sailing or anything, but I can say that we're gonna be here on the far side to the best of my knowledge and we're going to keep on pushing to make that true.