Past Ventures
Harvest Food Box
A slow cooker meal delivery service built on one idea: if someone else does the chopping, eating well gets easier.
- Founded
- April 2017, Cutchogue, NY
- Founders
- Dr. Russ and Karen L'HommeDieu
- The box
- Three slow cooker meals a week, $69.99
- The food
- 100 percent vegan and gluten-free
It started with a client. Doc Russ had been sharing healthy recipes with the people he worked with, and one of them said he wanted to try them but they looked too complicated to make himself. So Doc Russ offered to hand over every ingredient already cut and measured. All the client had to do was put it in a crockpot. When other clients heard, they asked for the same thing.
“I said to my wife, I think there's a business here. But I don't want to be one of the big companies that puts food in a box and ships it out the door. I want to help educate people and create a sense of community around this.”
How it worked
Russ and Karen launched Harvest Food Box in April 2017. Each week a box held three recipes, with every ingredient measured, chopped, and individually bagged. The recipes were color-coded, so you matched ingredients by color, and they were written for the slow cooker, with enough left over for another meal. They drew on Indian, Asian, and Mexican cooking, or as Doc Russ put it, “anything that can go into a pot.”
Everything was vegan and gluten-free. Because each ingredient came in its own bag, a customer allergic to something like nuts or soy could simply leave it out. Anyone who wanted meat could add it: “It's so much easier to add meat to vegan meals than vice versa,” he said. “We're trying to help people eat more vegetables.”
Orders were prepared in space at Backyard Brine Pickle Co. in Cutchogue and delivered across Southold Town, west to Baiting Hollow and south to Hampton Bays. To build the community they had in mind, the couple hosted a free plant-based lunch at their home. They said a blessing before preparing each meal.