Life may be full of twists and turns, but more often than not, every person finds him or herself in the same position three times every day: looking for something to eat. When you add perpetually hungry kids into that mix, the task of making sure everyone is fed can quickly become overwhelming.
Enter Yay Lunch, a scrappy startup launched in Charlottesville 18 months ago that this spring expanded to Richmond. Founded by Christina Liva, a food professional whose career has included stints at MindBodyGreen and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, and Derek Mansfield, the former president of the now-defunct Relay Foods, Yay Lunch offers parents a range of healthy, locally made options for their children’s lunches that can be ordered ahead online and then delivered to school.
“I was trying to solve a pain point in my own life,” Liva said. “And luckily I was able to solve a notorious pain point for a lot of other people.”
The genesis of Yay Lunch was simple frustration: When Liva sent her son to school for the first time, it was daunting to pack him lunch every day, but she didn’t like the options that his school offered, which she said were often high in fat, sugar and salt and low in protein.
“I actually couldn’t believe that even really progressive schools … would still be serving the food they’re serving,” she said.
When she reached out to administrators for a solution, she found that in many cases, school leaders’ hands were tied by funding restrictions or the logistics of purchasing large amounts of food for preparation. Private schools faced particular challenges in this area, since their size and independence prevented them from buying into the comprehensive contracts with major vendors that public school districts often use. Some lacked cafeterias or full-time kitchen staff, relying on what Yay Lunch Richmond market manager Daniel Klein characterized as “ad hoc” lunch programs.
Principals, Klein said, “are really relieved to hear about us.”
Yay Lunch’s model is similar to that of GrubHub or Uber Eats, albeit with a more streamlined mission of providing students with healthier lunch options. Parents go to the startup’s website to browse and select lunch choices. Yay Lunch then works with local vendors — in Richmond, Baker’s Crust, Zoe’s Kitchen, California Pizza Kitchen and B.Good — to prepare the meals and delivers them directly to schools.
With the startup acting as a logistical middleman, “the parent really only has to browse the website,” Klein said. Parents can order lunches up to three weeks in advance, and Yay Lunch is currently developing a tool to automatically refill lunch orders.
Standard prices range from $6 per week for one lunch delivery to $30 per week for all five days of delivery, with offerings ranging from beef burgers to chicken kebabs with turmeric rice, pita and fruit, to buttermilk biscuits and Virginia ham — “kids’ food, but a little more elevated than that,” according to Klein.
The menu benefited from student input during a pilot in Charlottesville, during which Liva sat in the cafeteria to hear what kids were saying about Yay Lunch’s offerings, an experience that she said was both very helpful and at times demoralizing.
“Kids are brutally honest,” she said.
After expanding to Richmond in spring 2018, Yay Lunch has begun working with three private schools — Veritas School in Northside, Blessed Sacrament Huguenot School in Powhatan and Millwood School in Midlothian — and is planning to deliver to Art 180’s afterschool program. As the academic year begins, Klein said the company anticipates delivering about 200 meals a day to Richmond students.
There is no cost to schools for students to receive Yay Lunch meals, but the company must have permission to enter the buildings for its deliveries.
Down the road, Klein said, the startup hopes to expand into public schools, but for now, private institutions “tend to be easiest from a growth perspective.”
With only three employees, Yay Lunch is at what Klein described as an “agile point.” Bootstrapped until now, the startup is currently exploring funding opportunities and has also received interest in its services from schools in Northern Virginia and D.C.
Despite such growth opportunities, Liva said, “the main focus is building a product that is really working — that kids are loving, that parents are happy to see their kids eating, that we’re solving a real problem.”
