On June 8, 1973, Andrew Cherng and his father opened a Chinese restaurant in Pasadena with $60,000 scraped together from family savings and a cousin's loan. The whole family worked without pay.

Fifty years later, Panda Express operates more than 2,500 locations, remains entirely family-owned, and recorded $5.9 billion in revenue in 2024. In July 2025, the company announced that its partnership with Children's Miracle Network Hospitals had crossed $200 million raised for children's hospitals across the country.

Almost none of it arrived as a check written at headquarters. It was collected a few cents at a time, at cash registers, by guests rounding up their orders.

Here's how they built a giving operation into the checkout line, and what you can take from it.

Andrew Cherng was born in 1948 in Yangzhou, China. He came to the United States in 1966, earned a mathematics degree from Baker University, and moved to Los Angeles in 1972 to help run a cousin's restaurant. Within a year he had found one of his own, and Panda Inn was born.

He met Peggy Tsiang at Baker. She earned a PhD from the University of Missouri and joined the family business as operations manager in 1982. Her arrival changed the company's trajectory. She built the computer systems that tracked customer feedback, inventory, and reordering at a time when almost no restaurant company was doing anything like that.

The first Panda Express opened in 1983 at the Glendale Galleria. By 1993 there were 100 locations.

The Cherngs invest their wealth through the Cherng Family Trust. In 2017 they gave $30 million to Caltech. In 2023 they gave $100 million to City of Hope to establish the Cherng Family Center for Integrative Oncology. Andrew has summed up the family's philosophy in a single line: "Life happens with help from other people."

Panda Cares, the company's philanthropic arm, was founded in 1999. Its focus is the health and education of underserved youth. The company says it has raised more than $415 million and reached over 15 million young people.

What separates Panda Cares from a typical corporate foundation is the source of its funding. The program runs on the transaction itself. Every guest at every register is invited to round up their total to the nearest dollar. Online orders carry the same option at checkout. Donation boxes sit in stores for good measure.

The bet is that small amounts, collected at enormous scale, become large amounts. Across more than 2,500 locations, the rounded-up change has exceeded $20 million in a single year, including 2020, when the restaurant industry was struggling through the pandemic.

Panda's partnership with Children's Miracle Network Hospitals began in 2007. By 2021, Panda had become one of only 10 corporate partners in CMN's history to cross $100 million in giving. Four years later the total passed $200 million.

Two design choices stand out.

First, the money stays local. Funds raised at a Panda Express store benefit the CMN member hospital in that store’s community, so a guest rounding up in Fresno supports Valley Children’s, and one in Fargo supports Sanford Children’s. That is a different proposition from donating to a national pool, and proximity does much of the persuading at the register.

Second, the gifts are unrestricted. Panda’s funds go directly to hospitals without strings attached, allowing each hospital to direct the money to whatever it needs in a given year, from equipment to family support programs.

In recent years, Panda has layered a more visible structure onto the register donations. Following a multimillion-dollar commitment to CMN Hospitals, Panda began funding Panda Cares Centers of Hope, dedicated physical spaces inside children’s hospitals designed around what the company calls the whole child, meaning a patient’s mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. The spaces range from playrooms and playgrounds to art, music, and pet therapy rooms, as well as gardens and libraries.

The locations stretch from California and Texas to Hawaii and Washington, D.C. At Sanford Children’s in Fargo, the Center of Hope sits inside the Sanford Traumatic Stress Treatment Center, the only comprehensive medical and behavioral health treatment center for traumatized children and families in North Dakota. Five new hospital Centers of Hope opened in the months following April 2025 alone, including a teaching garden at Sanford that physical and occupational therapists now use in their sessions.

The model also extends to Boys & Girls Clubs of America, where Panda funds Centers of Hope within local clubs. There were 159 of those by the end of 2025, against a stated goal of more than 400.

Panda Cares observes its anniversary on August 8, known as Panda Cares Day, with giving events held across the country throughout the month. Associates volunteer at local hospitals and clubs, and CMN’s leadership has publicly credited the company’s internal giving culture with driving guest participation. The fundraising is staffed by the cashiers, which means the program’s success depends on tens of thousands of hourly employees willing to make the ask, over and over, all year long.

In April 2026, CMN Hospitals announced it raised $473.7 million across all partners in 2025, the highest total in its history. Panda was a presenting sponsor of the conference where that record was announced.

1. The giving never stops, because it lives inside the transaction. A traditional corporate campaign runs for a season. Panda’s runs every hour the registers are open. There is no annual campaign to plan, no donor fatigue to manage, and the cost of raising each dollar stays low because the collection infrastructure already exists. In effect, the register replaces the gala.

2. Local money created local loyalty. Because each store funds its own community’s hospital, the hospitals treat Panda as a steady year-round partner rather than a one-time donor. Dell Children’s leadership has described Panda as a consistent presence that raises funds all year and donates meals to caregivers. The hospitals reciprocate with ribbon cuttings and public gratitude, and that visibility feeds back into the brand.

3. The Centers of Hope solved checkout charity’s visibility problem. The weakness of register giving is that the donor never sees what the money built. A few cents disappear into a receipt. Panda converted years of accumulated change into named, physical rooms where children are treated, which gives guests and associates a place they can walk into. It is a receipt you can visit.

4. Unrestricted funding made Panda the kind of partner institutions keep. Hospitals single this out consistently. Unrestricted money is the hardest kind to raise and the kind institutions value above everything else, because it can fill whatever gap is widest that year.

The obvious critique is that it is the guests’ money. Panda asks customers to donate and passes the funds along, so the $200 million was given by millions of individual people, while the brand’s name goes on the hospital wall. I think the critique is fair to raise, though somewhat incomplete. Panda pays for the program’s infrastructure, made its own multimillion-dollar commitment to fund the Centers of Hope, and staffs the entire effort. Still, a brand running checkout giving should be ready to answer the question of whose generosity is being celebrated.

The tax rumor is wrong, and it hurts programs like this one. A persistent social media claim says retailers write off customer donations on their own taxes. They cannot. Under U.S. tax law, the store acts only as a collection agent; the donation never enters its income or its expenses, and the customer is the one entitled to a deduction. Starting in 2026, taxpayers who take the standard deduction can deduct up to $1,000 in charitable gifts ($2,000 for couples filing jointly), which makes those small receipts worth keeping for the first time. Checkout programs depend on public trust, and misinformation at this scale corrodes it.

Giving tied to transactions rises and falls with the business. Panda’s fundraising depends on store traffic. A slow year for fast-casual dining becomes a slow year for the hospitals downstream, and the hospitals have no claim to the money the way they would with a committed multi-year grant.

1. Build the ask into a behavior that already happens. The strongest giving programs remove the need for a separate moment of decision. Panda attached generosity to a transaction that occurs hundreds of millions of times a year. If you run a brand, find the place where your customers already are and put the invitation there. If you lead fundraising at a nonprofit, the equivalent question is which of your supporters’ existing habits could carry a gift.

2. Keep the impact close to the donor. A guest’s change funds the children’s hospital in their own town, and that proximity does as much of the work as the cause itself. The feedback loop is shorter when the impact is nearby, and shorter loops keep donors giving.

3. Give small donors something they can see. Many campaigns treat small-dollar donors as anonymous volume. Panda turned their accumulated change into named rooms, gardens, and libraries inside hospitals. Visibility converts a one-time donor into a repeat donor, and the principle holds at the five-figure level just as well as at the fifty-cent level.

4. Unrestricted money buys a relationship that institutions remember. If you want a durable partnership with an institution rather than a plaque, unrestricted support is the strongest signal you can send.

5. Defend the truth about your program. The tax write-off rumor shows how quickly misinformation can corrode a giving channel built on millions of small acts of trust. If your model depends on broad public participation, correcting the record is part of stewardship. Panda’s program survived the rumor cycle. Smaller programs might not.

The same principle applies to partnerships. The ones that last are built on transparency, trust, and a clear sense of who benefits. If that's how you think about corporate giving, I'd like to hear from you.