LA Black-owned vegan burger pop-up suffers loss & needs help

LOS ANGELES - Jeremy and Gregory Pearson poured their life savings into a pop-up vegan burger restaurant and after two years were seeing success. Then, on July 29th, after a night at a flea market with satisfying sales the brothers headed home to their Rampart Village neighborhood, but the secure facility where they normally store their gear was closed and locked up. They parked the truck just outside of the facility instead.

The next morning their U-Haul packed with all of their gear, utensils, and supplies was gone. Nearby video surveillance footage captured the thieves driving away with their rental truck as another SUV followed closely behind. The thieves drove away with more than the truck full of equipment the brothers told KTLA 5 in a recent interview.

“Just to get everything taken away is heartbreaking,” Gregory said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

“I get emotional, man,” Jeremy said. “But we are thankful to you guys at KTLA and the community and people spreading awareness. God willing, we’ll be able to get back on our feet. We have the utmost faith that this won’t set us back, but launch us forward”

The idea for the brothers’ vegan pop-up Slides ‘N Fries was drawn as inspiration from devasting personal losses in their family. In the GoFundme created to raise the funds to relaunch their pop-up vegan burger joint the brothers wrote:

“Growing up and witnessing the gruesome, long, painful and untimely deaths of both our grandmothers and our aunt due to diabetes, we knew that it was the food that was killing us. As adults, we knew we had to be the change we wanted to see. Not only for us but for our family.

“We are now proud to say that we have been on our plant-based journey for the past 4 years. We were inspired to start SLIDES ‘N FRIES after our mother beat Type 2 Diabetes within six months, simply by switching to a plantbased diet. This is why SLIDES ‘N FRIES is so important to us. Because we never want anyone to experience the pain of losing a loved one from something that could have been avoided.”

The Pearson brothers also detailed the pain of the loss of the business taken away by the theft:

We are still deeply hurt by this. We know that material things can be replaced. So that’s not what hurts the most. What hurts the most is, we worked day in and day out to create SLIDES ‘N FRIES. It took us a whole year before ever selling one single burger, just to come up with the recipe. We’re talking countless hours of planning, long days of food prepping, writing business plans, applying for permits, saving up all our money to buy equipment, maxing out our credit cards for expenses, neglecting our personal needs to see our business flourish, working endlessly in the hot sun at flea markets, working long nights into the wee hours of the morning in front of night clubs and venues, only to come home and have it all taken away in an instant.

The brothers told KTLA that they have filed a police report but said authorities told them getting their equipment back will be unlikely.