Melanie Lino never thought she’d be in the delivery business. But, like a lot of small business owners, she had to find a new way to move forward when the COVID-19 pandemic made the old way of doing things temporarily obsolete. “I’ve just been trying to look for what people need right now,” says Lino, co-owner of Bethlehem’s Lit Coffee Roastery and Bakeshop, where she sells goodies from her Made by Lino line. And those goodies—cakes, brownies, macarons and the like—were just what people needed, sweet treats to provide a respite from the doom and gloom of the nightly news. They also needed more practical items, like bread, so Lino began churning out some 30 loaves a week—more than quadruple her usual output. Lino began delivering those items, along with other locally sourced essentials like eggs, butter, honey, jams and cheeses, to porches across the Lehigh Valley.
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Still, she fears that she’s not doing enough. She laments having to lay off her staff of seven. “It was a terrible thing to have to do,” she says. “You don’t know how you’re even going to get through this situation.” But, even though Lino might think she’s falling short, Alicia Keys may beg to differ. Lino got to chat with the singer in April through Verizon’s “Pay It Forward Live,” a livestream series that aims to help small businesses affected by COVID-19. She told Keys about a fund they had established to help Lit’s furloughed employees. The conversation, while brief, was a bright spot for Lino. “At that point, it was still very fresh. We didn’t know what was going to happen to our business, our future—we still don’t. But it was a positive shift, right at that time.”
