A local Kildeer casual fast-food restaurant is bringing its name to this season's Friday night lights to support high school sports as one of the ways the company plans to build a relationship with the community.  

Fresh Stack's CEO and Co-Founder Sean Thomas explained one of Fresh Stack's core values and mission is to serve the local community. 

"We strive to cultivate authentic relationships with our communities. We believe the foundation of a community is trust. Our guests can count on us to source the freshest ingredients possible and handcraft honest food. There is no greater joy in this business than building a family out of our guests," the company mission statement found on its website stated.

As part of that mission, Fresh Stack is sponsoring the coverage of Palatine High School Football, home of the Pirates, as just one way to build that communal relationship.

"The mission, what we wanted to stand for that everybody could buy into and really believe in the mission is being involved in the community," Thomas told Illinois Business Daily in an interview. "We feel like it's really important to get involved in the community, give back, have that relationship and localize the brand to the neighborhood. Whereas we feel like the way to connect with the community and get involved is to get their feedback and build relationships so when they are looking for their next burger or milkshake, they can think of us. One way of building that relationship is through local high school football."

"I love football. Absolute love, and played it growing up," Thomas added. "A lot of our employees play high school football as we have employed a lot of high schoolers. So, there's a connection with our staff that are currently playing, or have played high school sports. It's also to support them so we build that relationship with the community."

"It's such a great time in life to really learn work ethic and core values," Thomas said. "A lot of the students that I have I can pinpoint who does or did in the past play sports just because of a very noticeable work ethic. Traits like showing up on time, being highly respectable, getting along and engaging with other team members. It's really impressive and I think it's an important thing to learn, especially as a young person. I played sports growing up my entire life. Sports taught me a lot of just foundational values that helped me get through and changed my life after college when starting off my career."

According to Thomas, being a part of the community is important to Fresh Stack, which is why the restaurant localized menu items, welcomes feedback from the community on menu items within reason, hires a lot of high school students, particularly high school athletes and began an intern program and supports local high school sports through sponsoring high school football coverage for Kildeer and Palatine.

Fresh Stack has also supported the local community by beginning an internship program to help local high school students and allowing students and the community to give feedback on menu items.

Asked what made them choose Kildeer to open the first Fresh Stack, Thomas said, "We spent a long time canvasing all the land from the southwest suburbs all the way up to the western suburbs. We circled back on Kildeer quite a few times and it really has the familiarity to my hometown. So I grew up in a suburb in Ohio a lot like Killdeer and Palatine. That just really reminded me a lot of where I grew up in. Not being a native of Chicago, I wasn't really necessarily loyal to one suburb over the next. But just that emotional connection to the area in terms of familiarity was really drew me there. Once we started to get to know some of the folks that lived in Killdeer, some of the local officials, it was for us where we really knew we'd like to be."

"The idea for Fresh Stack really started back in late 2018 where my business partner Fabio Viviani and everybody really started building the foundation for the concept, the menu, the direction, you know, which we wanted to take this concept and evolve our growth strategy in terms of which markets we might go to first and expand to," Thomas said. "Most recently we opened our second location with a partnership in Whole Food Markets in Lincoln Park in June."

Thomas also went over a little of his personal history of working for Wendy's and how it led to him having the idea of starting his own restaurant. 

"I try and wish to carry on my grandfather's and my family's legacy. He was obviously a very big believer and one of the first ones in the fast-food industry to be offering fresh food,": Thomas said. "[Fresh Stack] is just an extension of his philosophy that we're trying to grow here at Fresh Stack, but a little bit more elevated."

A third location in Oak Brook is set to open in a few weeks Thomas said.