• UNO Pizzeria & Grill’s internal concierge service will provide its employees with a beneficial, streamlined process to become fully vaccinated.
• The company will also provide a $50 gift card to every employee who gets vaccinated.

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UNO Pizzeria & Grill, with 90 stores in 18 states around the U. S., has created an internal concierge system to help employees secure and attend COVID-19 vaccine appointments. The free bilingual service is available to UNO employees at all company-owned locations as well as employees and temporary employees in the UNO Foods manufacturing plant and employees at the restaurant group’s corporate office.

Aiming to alleviate the stress from lack of information, technical challenges and language barriers that come with finding and securing a vaccine appointment, UNO Pizzeria & Grill created the concierge service to provide its employees with a beneficial, streamlined process to become fully vaccinated.

Additionally, UNO Pizzeria & Grill will offer a $50 gift card to every employee who gets vaccinated.

The concierge service, comprised of volunteer employees, offers a range of services, including working with government agencies to secure multiple appointments; sitting side-by-side with employees or hosting virtual sessions to help them navigate the various appointment sites; providing appointment reminders; sharing timely information on updates to regulations and details on when new vaccine sites become available; and, in certain circumstances, reimbursing employees for transportation to vaccine centers if they don’t have the means to get there on their own.

“Since our restaurants and other facilities don’t have a lot of employees at any one site, we don’t qualify for ‘workplace vaccination programs,’ which bigger companies can offer their employees,” said Erik Frederick, UNO Pizzeria & Grill’s CEO. “Our employees are everything to us, and we want to continue to put their health and safety first by making the process to secure a vaccine less cumbersome and daunting. We hope that every restaurant and food manufacturing company can help their employees in the same way. We’re all in this together! ”

The program was piloted last week with employees at UNO Foods, UNO’s frozen pizza plant in Brockton, Massachusetts. Brockton is one of the Massachusetts towns that was hit the hardest in terms of COVID-19 cases. Within days, the concierge service helped 87% of the plant’s employees secure vaccine appointments. Many of them have been eligible for some time but were unable to secure an appointment on their own.