During his military career, Gen. John Michel performed countless missions for his country. Now, his mission is to feed the hungry and serve great food to the community.
Michel is co-founder of Soulcial Kitchen with his wife Holly Michel. The Soulcial Kitchen hospitality campus in Swansea features an array of offerings that includes an on-site restaurant, a craft bar, a dog park, a food truck park with a concert stage, catering, food trucks and featuring food from Marco’s Express.
Meet Your Neighbor
Every Saturday, the Intelligencer publishes a “Meet Your Neighbor” story on local residents who deserve to be recognized for their work in the community. To make a nomination, email Scott Marion at smarion@edwpub.net.
“We have seven food trucks that we’ve spawned, and they’re now spread around the Metro East,” Michel said. “We initially wanted to focus on the food truck business as an agile means of servicing food deserts and replacing the loss of almost all the soup kitchen capacity across the region. However, we soon learned that that 80% of food truck operators in the United States fail within five years and realized we needed to also do something to address the high food truck failure rate if we were going to be able to effectively execute our mission.
“We discovered the reason is that many of them fail is because they don’t have a clear grasp of how to core business principles, especially the mobile hospitality business. We set to look out for a solution and couldn’t find one, so we created the first food truck apprentice program in the United States.”
After starting the apprenticeship program and people were trained and certified to operate their own food trucks, they learned another problem was that people didn’t have the financial resources to buy their own food truck. That was when he and his wife started the food truck entrepreneurship program.
“We chose to fund their business forward, which means we give build our acquire their food truck on a five-year note for exactly what we paid for it, and that way they’re developing their business and earning their way to owning it,” Michel said. “At the end of five years, we give them the title to the truck.
“All those trucks are part of our capacity, so when we need it, we call them to go to East St. Louis or wherever we’re headed to deliver 100 free meals, and we pay them to do it. We’re financially and ‘soulcially’ incentivizing the folks we have helped move into the food truck business to create what we call ‘dignified dining’ and today, we have 28 different food trucks and brick and mortar businesses in three states that are now participating.”
‘Driven by mission’
Michel, who describes himself as an “accidental social entrepreneur,” is a former senior military officer who joined the Air Force in 1988 as an aviator and finished pilot training in 1989.
He led numerous organizations at all levels of command, both domestically and overseas. In his final assignment, he was the commanding general for NATO Air Training Command Afghanistan and was charged with the $8 billion, 14-nation effort to building the Afghan Air Force in an active combat zone, an unprecedented effort.
Michel retired as a brigadier general on Jan. 1, 2015, and transitioned into the corporate world, which he didn’t find as satisfying as military life.
“My wife and I were driven by mission and that’s when we decided to get serious about mission as a way of life, and that’s how we landed on the idea of Soulcial Kitchen, which we founded and launched in June 2021,” Michel said.
“The concept of ‘Soulcial’ was originally born in 2006 while I was doing my doctoral work out of Seattle on social system transformation, with the idea that business can and should be a force for good and we’re at our best when we are in service to other people. My wife and I actually trademarked the word ‘Soulcial’ during that time, but it sat on the shelf for 15 years because we had no idea what we were going to do with it.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michel watched the food insecurity problem grow in America, with 92% percent of the soup kitchen capacity disappearing.
“Providing hot meals to individuals experiencing food insecurity was already a model that was changing, and we knew it wasn’t coming back, but it was important for people to have access to hot, healthy food,” Michel said. “We had an idea to use the phenomenon called food trucks, which were already growing dramatically before COVID and increased exponentially during the pandemic.
“People see food trucks as a fun novelty, but we view them as intentional community capacity. We wanted to create a system where we could access food trucks, with their varied flavors and menus, on demand in any community. With mobile food trucks, there is no such thing as a food desert.”
‘Every city in America has broken people’
The way Michel sees it, there is no end to the expansion possibilities for Soulcial Kitchen and its associated programs.
“Every city in America has broken people who are hungry, and those cities all have restaurants and food trucks,” Michel said. “Across our nation every day, we have both fixed and mobile kitchen capacity and they’re rarely (if ever) 100% fully utilized, so we said, ‘What if we paid you $8 to create meals that are hot and healthy and offer people who are struggling with food access some choices?’ In effect, the concept is about transforming excess community food capacity and intentionally using it for good.”
At the core of the model of matching hot food providers and neighbors in need is The Currency of Caring, a tokenized “feed-it-forward” program that enables patrons to purchase a unique token and gift those in need with a hot meal redeemable at any participating restaurant or food truck community partner. The Currency of Caring tokens can be purchased online or at any of the Soulcial Kitchen food trucks or restaurants and to date has provided nearly 18,000 free hot, restaurant quality meals.
“We just added three Currency of Caring locations in Louisiana and will soon be expanding the program to Kansas, our fourth state to adopt the effort. One of our primary goals is to use this initiative to reduce food insecurity rate in the military, which today stands at 26%,” Michel said. “We had a hugely successful pilot program at Scott Air Force Base, and we intend to keep growing.”
A related effort fueled by the Currency of Caring, is Love Thy Neighbor. Every time Soulcial Kitchen network partners collect 100 tokens, a food truck is dispatched to deliver 100-125 free, hot, restaurant quality meals to a designated neighborhood or people group.
“Many people put those tokens in the lanterns we have set up at every participating restaurant or food truck and when we have collected 100 tokens, we have another funded truck,” Michel said. “That’s the supply side of the equation and then we support the demand side, which is any nonprofit that serves humanity.
“Local and regional nonprofits can be the beneficiary of one of our Love Thy Neighbor food trucks. As the supply comes in, we match it to demand and have now served more than 51 locations. That’s the power of mobility with a mission.”
In March 2024, Soulcial Kitchen and Food is Love, an eight-time Emmy nominated television show and not-for-profit social impact company headquartered in Alton, merged efforts. Michel now serves as the president of all Food is Love’s charitable, community impact efforts, working closely with master chef and Food is Love TV show host Lasse Sorensen.
Expanding into the Metro East
Working together, Michel and Sorensen have worked to expand partnerships across the Metro East and St. Louis region, including in East St Louis, Washington Park, Granite City and most recently, Collinsville at the Old Herald hospitality campus.
“Derik Reiser (owner of Old Herald) was an early adopter of our Currency of Caring mission, and we are now actively working together to scale it across the region,” said Michel.”
“We’re in the process of completely reinventing the Old Herald restaurant menu through Food is Love and also plan to open a dessert concept at Old Herald Square next to the outdoor concert stage. Meanwhile, The Old Herald associated Ardent Spirits distilling and brewing brand has just released a new line of packaged mixed drinks under the “Spirit of Giving” banner to support the Currency of Caring mission. The three initial flavors to roll out are espresso martini, mojito and old fashioned, with more on the way and 100% of profits directed to charity.”
Michel is especially proud of a food truck event set for 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 23 at the Dellwood Recreation Center in Ferguson, which illustrates the growth of Soulcial Kitchen and Food is Love.
“This is the third year we’ve been invited to Ferguson, Missouri, to feed hungry families and we’ve grown from three food trucks in 2002 to five in 2023 and now to seven in 2024,” Michel said. “This will be the biggest free food truck giveaway ever in St. Louis with seven food trucks and 700 meals, all free to families in Ferguson.
“The meals are great, but each one of these trucks are also a winning story as they feature someone that has come from, or joined into, our entrepreneurial program. They have great mobile businesses and every once in a while, they get to do this mission, and they love it.”
