Pete Bloehm chuckled when asked whether he often picks up the phone to find someone requesting 800 sandwiches by the next morning. In 21 years of operating Panini Pete’s, he said, this was a first.
The request started with 600.
On Monday afternoon, The Salvation Army’s Emergency Disaster Services team needed additional meals for Hurricane Isaias survivors by Tuesday morning. They turned to Ed Bushaw, a longtime Mobile resident and Development Director for The Salvation Army Coastal Alabama. Bushaw knows the hospitality industry well. He had worked with Pete before and thought the local favorite might be able to help.
He said a prayer and made the call.
The Fairhope manager called Pete immediately. Did they have enough ingredients? Enough time? Enough hands? There were hundreds of sandwiches to make and only so many hours before morning. When Pete heard what the meals were for, he called Ed back.
“I’ll go all over the world to find that product,” he told Ed. “We’re gonna make this happen.”
About 30 minutes later, the manager called Pete again. The request had grown to 800. Pete’s approach was to “divide and conquer.” He called his managers in Fairhope and Mobile to check their supplies of turkey, ham, cheese and bread. Between the two locations, they would prepare 600 sandwiches in Fairhope and 200 in Mobile.
Then came the team needed to make it happen. “We’re doing this for people who really, really need it,” Pete recalled telling employees. “So we need to come in early. We need to stay late. We need to get this done.”
Employees formed an assembly line and began making sandwiches Monday afternoon. Pete headed out for additional cheese, chips and cookies, gathering what they needed to turn the sandwiches into complete lunches. Employees stayed late and came in before dawn, wrapping sandwiches, packing boxes and stacking finished meals. “Everybody just pitched in,” Pete said.
By 8:30 a.m., every table in the Fairhope dining room was stacked high with boxed lunches. Pete chuckled as he recalled “tripping over” the meals and texting Ed to let him know they were ready for pickup. Four Salvation Army mobile feeding units collected the meals and headed out to serve Lenox, Flomaton and Brewton.
In Flomaton, word spread that the team had fresh sandwiches from Panini Pete’s. Cars lined up around the Flomaton Fire Department and extended up the street. For families who had spent days without power or running water, eating from boxes and working long hours in high heat to pick up the pieces of their lives, lifting the lid to find a freshly prepared sandwich offered a moment to pause and enjoy a familiar comfort. A taste of normal.
“Oh my God, fresh bread,” one woman exclaimed as she opened hers with a huge smile.
Back at the restaurants, the order had helped meet another need. Pete’s restaurants had closed early Friday and reopened Saturday, but the hurricane had taken a toll on sales. Some employees had lost power. Others had left town for safety. Customers were scarce, as they were either preparing for the storm or cleaning up afterward. Pete said The Salvation Army’s patronage helped recover some of those lost sales while giving his team an opportunity to help their neighbors.
The experience also gave him a closer look at the organization’s work beyond the familiar Christmas kettles. “It’s a great organization,” Pete said of The Salvation Army. Seeing teams respond to the disaster and bring food into affected communities gave him another reason to appreciate its work.
“It was really good and inspiring for us,” he said.
That work began the day after the storm. The Salvation Army has provided more than 27,000 meals and snacks, 5,200 bottles of water, and 119 cleanup kits, including food to support partner organizations’ shelter operations. Working alongside local churches and volunteer fire departments, teams have brought food, supplies, and a listening ear to neighbors facing heartbreak and doing the difficult work of rebuilding their lives.
For The Salvation Army, meeting the need also meant looking for ways to support the community’s recovery. Purchasing from Panini Pete’s put resources back into a local business affected by the same storm, while its mobile feeding teams carried fresh meals to neighbors still without power. Pete’s team gave extra hours and willing hearts and hands to turn a prayer and a phone call into fresh meals and moments of joy for survivors of Hurricane Isaias.
“We’re gonna make this happen,” Pete had told Ed.
By the next morning, they had.
