Executive Summary

Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) has created some of New York’s most beloved restaurants, cafes, and bars, offering outstanding food delivered with signature warmth. Radish Health provides USHG with important counsel and technology to help ensure thousands of employees have fast, effective access to care—with or without a pandemic.

Radish offers important economic advantages, but the primary reason we chose it as a long term provider for USHG was much more about the quality of care and personalized service it’s able to offer our employees every day.

Diana Getchius, SHRM-CP
Director of Human Resources
USHG

The Challenge

Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) has created some of New York’s most beloved restaurants, cafes, and bars—employing more than 2,100 area residents. When the pandemic hit in 2020, USHG sought informed counsel about how to manage employees and sites in a safe and compliant way. It also sought an affordable healthcare platform that would provide all of its employees going forward with access to fast, personalized care.

The Solution

Radish Health.

The Results

Radish Health was uniquely capable of providing expert advice about how to manage employees and sites in ways that were safe, conformed to necessary regulations, and made solid business sense.

Better still, Radish offered a telehealth platform ideally suited to USHG employees, combining primary care with mental health and nutrition counseling in an integrated way that provides quick, customized service.

If you’ve had the chance to visit New York, you may be familiar with such spots as Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Shake Shack, The North End Grill, Manhatta, and Cedric’s at the Shed. Each of these dining destinations delivers meticulously fashioned food in settings of unique character and studied ambience. And each of these dining destinations is owned and run by Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG).

“The pandemic hit us really hard; at one point we had to lay almost everyone off and plan our rebuilding strategy.”

Today, USHG has roughly 2,100 full-time employees throughout the New York metropolitan area. This staff includes everything from front-line bartenders, servers, hosts, prep cooks and line cooks to an operations team focused on keeping its facilities functioning and supply chains delivering on time.

Radish Health is a healthcare innovator that offers an integrated, comprehensive health plan combining primary care physician, diet counseling, mental health.

“The pandemic hit us really hard,” says Patti Simpson, USHG’s Chief People Officer, who had never seen anything so severe in her career building and managing other hospitality organizations. This posed unique challenges in navigating appropriate healthcare for a blend of full and part-time employees—especially with the conflicting information about healthcare that was flooding the media.

Radish Health stepped in and offered USHG the expertise, information, and guidance that was uniquely helpful for the organization as it planned its moves forward post-pandemic.

Known as a growing New York-based healthcare services organization with a strong reputation for offering benefits suited for almost every need, Radish helped USHG navigate difficult healthcare decisions. This included implementing an ongoing healthcare program that provided a wide variety of employees easy and affordable ways to stay healthy, happy, and productive. “Radish turned into sort of a Chief Medical Officer for our executive team,” Patti explains. “That was immense for us.”

“Radish really taught us about Covid, and helped us understand protocols and compliance from a medical and HR standpoint better than any other resource we had.”

Patti Simpson
Chief People Officer
USHG

A Qualitative Difference in Care

Business Differentiation and Peace of Mind

As of 2021, only 32% of hospitality workers have healthcare coverage, compared to 77% of private
industry workers, according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today, restaurant employee turnover is
occurring much more rapidly than before the pandemic (169.9 percent at the non-management level,
per Black Box Intelligence). “Being able to offer the quick, affordable, and comprehensive healthcare is an important differentiator for us,” says Patti. “But beyond the business aspect of it all, I feel a sense of calm and pride. With Radish’s help, we’re really able to take care of our teams, which is a central tenet of how we do business.”