Despite the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus still soaring around California and throughout the country, state and local governments have begun loosening restrictions on businesses. Here’s how businesses are adjusting.

While the shelter-in-place measures have helped slow the spread of COVID-19, they have taken a huge economic toll and have been devastating for breweries, especially small breweries that once relied on sales for consumption in their taprooms.

Jessica Bryant, a former personal trainer who was raised on a cattle ranch, started Corn Poppy Produce in 2019 to promote healthier living in the Stockton community.

The family behind Tabeaux Cellars is not of your standard wine-country lineage. Rather, they are “just a family producing a decidedly small allocation of foothill glou glou,” as the winery’s charming Instagram bio states. 

In the Capital Region, a homegrown meal prep market has been thriving for years. There are more than a dozen meal prep services in the region, ranging from the home-based and dubiously legal to nationally distributed brands. 

Almond trees and grapevines will die if deprived of irrigation for a year or less in a dry place like the San Joaquin Valley, but pistachios can survive for years with almost no water. That means, in crisis-level droughts, the trees might persist where virtually all other crops die.

Though restaurants are among the businesses hit hardest by the coronavirus, local restaurateurs have pooled their resources to help seniors, low-income families and others access food. 

Based in Auburn, the Common Cider Company produces around 75,000 gallons of hard cider monthly. Owner Fran Toves began brewing cider on a dare in 2012.

Comstock’s has been following four businesses that have been helping to drive the resurgence of Sacramento’s central city in recent years. Here’s how they’re faring a month into the shutdown.

Thanks to a temporary relaxation of Alcoholic Beverage Control laws, most California breweries have pivoted to curbside and delivery business. But how much longer local breweries will survive — and what the long-term effects of the pandemic on the Sacramento-area beer scene will be — remain unknown.