Souper Jenny's Zadie Project turns 1,000 quarts of soup a week into help for Atlanta families

Before Souper Jenny opens for business on Tuesday mornings, the restaurant becomes an assembly line.

Volunteers carry large containers of freshly made soup from the cooler. Others ladle it into quart containers, snap on lids, and pack the containers into boxes.

By the time they are finished, hundreds of quarts are ready to leave the restaurant. Over the course of a week, the Zadie Project distributes about 1,000 quarts of soup to schools and community organizations across metro Atlanta.

"The job requirements are pretty much show up and try not to spill too much soup," joked volunteer Bill Murphy, an Atlanta actor who has been showing up for about five years.

Behind the humor is an operation that founder Jenny Levison says was designed to make community service part of Souper Jenny's everyday business.

"This was always intentional to do something, to be part of the community," Levison said. "I was looking for a way when we first started up: How can we do something for our community every day instead of the one-offs that we're asked for?"

Levison started the Zadie Project in 2016 and named it for her father. "Zadie" is Yiddish for grandfather and was what he was known as in the family. Her father was an attorney who continued working well into his 90s. Levison said she grew up watching him give back.  

"My father was very philanthropic and very involved in the community," she said. "I think we learned by watching what he did."

Levison had already built Souper Jenny into a thriving Atlanta restaurant business, now with five metro Atlanta locations and a sixth opening in Oconee later this month. She wanted philanthropy to become part of that business rather than something it did only occasionally.

The result was the Zadie Project. The nonprofit focuses particularly on families with school-age children who may have access to breakfast and lunch at school but still struggle to put food on the table at home.

Levison said the need is easy to find once a business becomes connected to the community around it — from families living in areas with limited access to food to seniors who may have difficulty getting to a grocery store.

"The need has not decreased," Levison said. "It's only increasing."

The soup operation is powered by volunteers. About 10 to 15 people rotate through the project, with a crew gathering each week to package the soup before the restaurant opens.

Kathleen Petrie has been volunteering since 2020. She said a shift that once packaged roughly 400 to 500 quarts can now handle more than 800. For Petrie, the work is about more than filling containers.  

"We definitely feel when the community comes in to pick up their soup, you definitely feel their gratefulness for it," she said.

She described the volunteers as one link in a much longer chain connecting the restaurant to people throughout the community.  

"To be a part of that chain, to sort of help this go along is really powerful," Petrie said.

Murphy said volunteers don't necessarily know where each container ends up once it leaves the restaurant.  But he knows what it can mean when it gets there.  

"I like thinking that, you know, once it leaves here, it goes to help kids who may not have a good meal," Murphy said. "Maybe this is their only meal for the day."

One of the places the Zadie Project's soup goes is Benjamin Banneker High School in College Park.

There, Tifanie Bishop, an administrative assistant for the school's SAFE Center, keeps containers of soup in a refrigerator inside a free store where students can get groceries and other necessities. On the refrigerator is a sign with one word: "Unlimited."  

"They can take as many as they like," Bishop said. "They tell me they have 20 people in their household; we're going to do our best."

Bishop said the store is available to the entire school, helping remove some of the stigma that might otherwise come with asking for food.  Students typically shop on Fridays, an important day for those who may be facing a weekend without the free breakfast and lunch available at school.

Some students and families are also moving frequently or do not have a permanent place to live, she said.  For them, a quart of prepared soup can be particularly useful because it requires little more than heating.

"When you come to school, you can get breakfast and lunch for free," Bishop said.  "But then after school, if you're going home to nothing, you know, it's everything to you and your family."

Levison is careful not to suggest that 1,000 quarts of soup a week can solve the larger problem of hunger.

The Zadie Project is a small nonprofit operating alongside a restaurant business, and Levison acknowledges there is a limit to what it can do.  But dinner is different from solving hunger.  Dinner is immediate.

"Even donating a thousand quarts of soup a week — what difference does that really make?" Levison said.  "But it moves the needle a little bit. It's getting a group that meal where they might not have it."

It is a lesson Levison first learned by watching her father.  Now, it is being passed along — one quart at a time.