Who Benefits from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund?

5 Min Read By Lei Han, Ph.D., CPA

The Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) was established by the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act of 2021, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 11, 2021, with the intention of helping small to mid-sized businesses in the food service industry, which was hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Small Business Administration (SBA hereafter) was charged to administer the $28.6 billion tax-free grant. At the end of April, the SBA launched the registration portal online for RRF.  On May 3, when the website officially opened, applications started to pour in and quickly exhausted the funding pool. By the end of June, the SBA received more than 278,000 applications with requests totaling $72.2 billion (SBA, n.d. -a). Only 101,600 lucky applicants received approvals of their requests. On July 2, the SBA administrator Isabel Guzman announced the closure of the RRF program in a press release.

According to the program guidelines (SBA, n.d. -b), the RRF grants can be used for…