MONROE — Jeff Ewald had a creative idea to give back to his community, but he just felt he needed to make sure he had everything in place before putting the wheels in motion. That day came a few weeks ago during a Monday Night Football game. While his close friends were watching the NFL game on the TV at his Monroe restaurant, BuggyWorks Public House, he was locked in on his phone and computer — thinking, waiting.

Then, it was go-time.

“I’ve been trying to find the right people to help me roll it out and deploy it. Once I was comfortable and I felt the plan was good and we had a stable foundation,” it started, Jeff said.

The idea branched off of what other restaurants had done before: a Pay It Forward program. In most places, a meal is purchased, and someone in need of a meal can take the ticket off of the wall and turn it in. Jeff’s idea was slightly different: pre-purchased packages with four meals worth of food that was made in-house at BuggyWorks and can be redeemed at the door, carry-out only, taken home and swiftly reheated. No questions from the cooks or the staff, just a meal ready to go home to feed someone in need.

“The way we’re doing it is that we can do it in bulk. We batch cook all this stuff, let it rest, process it, package it, and freeze it all in the same day. That way we know we’re giving people fresh, healthy, safe, clean, delicious hot meals,” Ewald said, “and that’s been a key to being able to pull this off. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do for as long as we can pull it off.”

BuggyWorks Public House, which recently made the slight change to its name, sits at 1015 18th Avenue, Suite 112 inside the Fitzgibbons Building one block east of Monroe’s downtown square. Just to the right of the entry door a rusty wheel hangs from the wall, with two large tokens dangling off.

Ewald said he purchased the wheel last summer from Vintique Junque here in Monroe.

“It’s really about the wheel,” he said. “I like how my friend Adam (Bansley) put it, ‘The wheel doesn’t care,’ you know? The wheel here serves one purpose and doesn’t care who, or why, or what. It doesn’t ask any questions — it just exists to serve its purpose. There’s something kind of profound in that.”

The tokens, made by Sniff n Fumes Art Lounge in Monroe, represent a pre-purchased meal. The pig token represents a pound of pulled pork, four buns, coleslaw and barbeque sauce. The chicken token is the same stuff mostly, but with a pound of smoked chicken.

The package cost $15 each and can be bought online, over the phone or inside the restaurant. Finding generous purchasers has not been a problem. In just over two weeks since launching the project, more than 100 packages have been bought. At four meals per package, it means more than 400 meals have been pre-sold. Ewald said the bigger piece of the puzzle is finding the people that need the meals. So far, just over 30 tokens have been redeemed, which means mouths have been fed more than 120 times because of it.

“It’s just a creative thing to get food from people that want to help, to people that need the help,” Ewald said.

He asked each member of his 15-person staff to donate just one dollar at the start — they all did — and thus BuggyWorks was the first to pre-order a meal. Since then, the Pay It Forward Buggy Wheel has taken off. Ewald said there have been several people buy $100 to $150 worth of meals to donate.

“One family pledged us $1,000,” he said. He first got the idea during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. That year BuggyWorks gave away Thanksgiving meals, and Jeff said the effort really touched his heart.

But he wanted to do more than just a free meal one day a year. So since then, he and “the right group of people” have been working out the logistics to make the project a year-long endeavor.

Helvetia Systems in New Glarus helped integrate Ewald’s team.

“My friends Mike and Leslie helped us find the right people to get together and help us” Ewald said. “The whole community is just digging into this and given us so much support. This is not all about me, not at all. This is community — and more specifically, this is our community. I’ve got a lot of hope — we’ve got a lot of hope. It’s not enough to solve the whole problem, but enough to solve some desperate needs out there.”

BuggyWorks is still a for-profit business, Ewald added. That means he can’t just give away meals for free.

“We’re integrating it in a way that makes sense so that we can continue to deliver the experience people expect when they come here. We aren’t doing this to make money, but we aren’t giving it away — we can’t give it away. We need both kinds of people: the people that want to help, and the people that need the help,” Ewald said. “We’re holding these meals now, we’re ready to deploy them.”