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Saturday 18 November 2017

Mindful Chef > gluten and dairy-free food boxes from Devon

Last month, the Herald featured 'local boy done good':
Mindful Chef receives £1million in donations in five days - Latest Sidmouth and Ottery News - Sidmouth Herald

Not everyone is convinced of having food-boxes delivered:
Is this cooking for idiots? My week eating nothing but ‘recipe box’ food | Life and style | The Guardian
The rise of the DIY meal kit: fad or future? - Telegraph

But if you are going to have food delivered to you, make sure it's fresh from the West-Country:
The Best Home Recipe Box Delivery Services For 2017 - Forbes
The best recipe boxes - food delivery boxes - Good Housekeeping

The Express & Echo this week looked at how the venture is going:

How three friends from Devon set up a multi-million pound foodie business

With Victoria Pendleton and Andy Murray as backers, the healthy food delivery firm is going from strength to strength


COMMENTS

By Becky Sheaves
16 NOV 2017


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Three friends from Devon have started a food delivery service which has gone from having just 30 customers two years ago to shipping 11,000 recipes every week today.

“We focus on delivering healthy food complete with a recipe, so busy people can cook a hassle-free meal in the evening,” explains Giles Humphries, 31, who grew up in Sidmouth.

Dinner could be honey, balsamic and mustard pork traybake or a Mediterranean pollack stew with olives. “You choose your meal and we will send you the exact ingredients, so you have everything you need and nothing is wasted,” explains Giles. “We send sauces in sachets and even ship single eggs.”


Myles Hopper, Giles Humphries and Rob Grieg-Gran set up Mindful Chef just two years ago

The food is all gluten and dairy-free, with an emphasis on Westcountry produce and quality ingredients. It’s proving such a hit, especially in London and within the M25, that a recent crowd-funding event for the fledgling business raised an astonishing £2 million. Major backers now include the tennis star Andy Murray and cycling Olympic champion Victoria Pendleton as well as rugby star Will Greenwood.

“Well, it was beyond our wildest dreams, to be honest,” says Giles, who runs Mindful Chef with his schoolfriends Myles Hopper, 28, from Exeter and Rob Grieg-Gran, 32, who comes from Lympstone.

So how did the three friends go from packaging up just 30 chicken portions a week in the back bedroom of their shared flat to running such a successful business? This year’s turnover is set to top the £5 million mark. It’s very impressive for a company that has only been going for two years.

“It all started when our friend Rob went to work in New York,” explains Giles. “When he came home, he was telling us that in America people were getting their meals delivered to them in recipe boxes. Each box contained everything you need to cook a meal that night, right down to the dash of soy sauce or a herb garnish on top.



Myles, left and Giles, right, source produce from Devon for their recipe delivery boxes

“We all met up to go on a fishing trip off Lympstone and were chatting about how great the Devon crab is and whether it would be possible to get it delivered to people around the country. And so the Mindful Chef was born.”

Fortunately, the three friends – who all went to Exeter School together – had a good mix of skills when it came to setting up a high-tech food delivery business. Rob was working in finance as a trader for Morgan Stanley (hence his stint in New York), Giles was working in marketing at M&C Saatchi and Myles was a personal trainer and nutrition coach.

“We had the idea first in the summer of 2014 and then by April of 2015 we had gone to lots of small suppliers in Devon and across the South West. At first we only had a tiny number of customers, pretty much just friends and family, because we wanted to start small and iron out any glitches.”

And so Mindful Chef was born. Each meal can be cooked within 30 minutes and is gluten free. “We also do not include any refined carbs, so there is no pasta, no rice and no bread in our dishes. Also, each recipe has a maximum of ten ingredients so they are easy and straightforward to prepare. The whole idea is to make healthy eating a lot easier.

“Many people struggle, especially midweek, to find the time to cook healthy food from scratch. And when you’re tired and busy, that’s when you make unhealthy food choices,” explains Giles. “A Mindful Chef box is delivered to your door so you don’t have to shop, or debate what to have for dinner - it’s all just there for you.”

The business was first launched just within London, which is where it is based to this day. It now has a small full-time team of nine people, including a chef who devises the recipes and a photographer who takes mouthwatering pictures of each and every dish.

There are also two staffers working on social media and a warehouse in north London where a team of part-timers pack the meals ready for distribution.

Mindful Chef also had a lucky break early on with a publishing deal from Penguin. “We have had the chance to create a healthy recipe book with Penguin which was fantastic for our marketing,” says Giles. The first Mindful Chef book was published in the spring this year, with another in the pipeline.

As the business has grown, the logistics of sourcing food have changed. “At first, we were asking people for 20 chicken breasts and they said it was too small an order but now we are looking for 10,000,” says Giles. “

We have had to change suppliers in some cases and now source all over the country rather than just Devon. For example, we now get our chicken from a company in Yorkshire called Farmison as we just needed someone big enough to cope with our scale, which still produced top-quality meat. They are the online butcher of the year and really good. But we get our fish from St Ives in Cornwall and we often do one-off recipes using Devon-sourced produce.”

For the future, the team are ambitious: “Yes, we’ve have grown very fast and that’s wonderful. But compared to some of the larger players in the food delivery market, we’re still very small,” says Giles. “And compared to the supermarkets, we are tiny. But we really do believe that home delivery of shopping is the future of food.

They would also like to return to Devon in the future: “We need to be here in London right now to get the business going but we would love one day to relocate the company to Devon,” says Giles. “It’s such a lovely place to live and when you’re battling on the Tube, you really do miss it. We come home to visit whenever we can.”

www.mindfulchef.com



How three friends from Devon set up a multi-million pound foodie business - Devon Live

Some good ideas here:
Our ULTIMATE healthy, food swaps | Mindful Chef - YouTube
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