You know the type: A big box filled with ice packs and roughly three dozen tiny plastic containers is shipped to your house every few weeks, in an effort to get you to cook more — and it works for many. The meal prep service industry is filled with now-household names like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and HomeChef.
But one company wants to take the benefits of the meal prep service while giving back at almost every level.
Chef Ami was founded in 2013 in Gainesville before expanding to Tampa in 2018.
"We were a young couple that had the issue of deciding what to do for dinner and were making the same recipes — tacos, spaghetti — there wasn’t much variety in what we did," Matt Dickhaus, co-founder of Chef Ami, said of himself and co-founder and wife Johanna. "So, we found we were eating out a lot and when we tried to recreate what we were liking, we ended up with so much food waste. We had the problem in our own lives and tried to find a solution, and it turned out a lot of other people had the same issue."
Unlike the national brands, the company works with local farmers to offer fresh food each week.
"The dinner kit is a fairly modern phenomenon and when they first came out, we tried them, but unfortunately with the big companies the food isn’t very fresh," said Elijah Dickhaus, Matt's brother and president for the Tampa branch. "It's shipped across to [the company] and then they ship it to you, so the quality control isn’t very good. The realization we came to was, there was a real opportunity to keep things local."
That local love is taken one step further: For each meal someone buys, a meal is donated to Feeding Tampa Bay. In the last year alone, the company has donated 22,000 to the charity.
"If you look at the stats, it's pretty shocking how many people are food insecure in the area," Elijah said. "So, it's nice to know when you have a meal, someone else in your community is sitting down for their own meal every time."
Matt Dickhaus also wanted to cut down on unnecessary waste, both in food and the packaging itself. In some national meal prep boxes, each ingredient comes in its own plastic casing or bag. Food items from Chef Ami come in containers that are recyclable and made of recycled materials. The packaging itself, including the gel packs, are picked up by the company's delivery drivers and sanitized, then reused.
The emphasis on local does limit a nationwide expansion. But for Dickhaus, that is also a positive.
"We could offer our services in a larger geographic area if we wanted to ship, but I just don't feel comfortable adding to that amount of waste," he said. "Part of our goal was, and is, to create a sustainable approach to provide dinner for people and part of that is reducing the packaging and environmental impact of shipping food across the country."
The company currently has four full-time employees with 45 drivers who deliver the meal kits. It is entirely bootstrapped, and they have no intention to seek additional funds, according to the Dickhaus brothers.
"If the right partner came along and wanted to do something big, then maybe," Matt said. "But one of our advantages is being small. You have a lot more control over your product, and contact with the customer, which really goes a long way."
And with the coronavirus pandemic causing many to stay home, people found themselves turning to pick up a spatula a bit more.
"A lot are looking to fit their time and stay healthy," Elijah said. "And I have had customers write in and say, 'I get to take a night off while my 9-year-old cooks.'"
