Rad•ish Eats is a worker-owned cooperative restaurant concept currently in pre-pilot incubation within CHAAD. It was created in response to a bar and restaurant industry that employs millions of people yet is structurally designed to produce economic insecurity, high turnover, unsafe working conditions, and widespread business failure; harms that fall most heavily on women, queer people, immigrants, and Black and Brown workers. The dominant model extracts labor and value from workers while offering no pathway to ownership, stability, or long-term wealth.

Rad•ish Eats is testing a different approach: ownership as workforce development. Research shows that employee-owned businesses outperform traditional firms, have significantly higher survival rates, and generate meaningful wealth gains—especially for low-income and Black households—yet worker ownership remains rare in hospitality due to lack of access, capital, and sector-specific models. Through CHAAD’s incubation, Rad•ish Eats is developing a worker-owned, not-for-profit restaurant model that embeds living wages, democratic governance, transparent finances, and cooperative training from the outset.

During this pre-pilot phase, Rad•ish Eats is focused on model design, worker-owner training, and operational planning. The long-term goal is to launch a restaurant that provides stable incomes without tipped wage dependence, builds ownership equity for workers, and prioritizes health, safety, and dignity through non-carceral, community-based practices. Training extends beyond service skills to include financial literacy, leadership, and cooperative governance: building durable, transferable capacity for workers over time.

Longer-term, Rad•ish Eats is envisioned as a community wealth engine. Once operational and financially sustainable, surplus would be reinvested into food access, mutual aid, community safety and harm reduction, and partnerships with food justice movements. Rooted in Chicago, a global food city and the historic heart of the U.S. labor movement, Rad•ish Eats aims to demonstrate how not-for-profit enterprise and worker ownership can function together as a scalable alternative to an extractive hospitality economy.

Think of Rad•ish less as a “pop-up” and more as a communal experiment. It’s a seedling we are placing in the hands of our people. A way to test, together, what hospitality looks like when it is free from exploitation.