Today I had a chat with Myles Hopper, one of the founders of Mindful Chef. Mindful Chef is a health-focused food box company that was founded in 2015. They started the business with their customers as friends and family only and they now try to treat all their customers like that. They have grown incredibly. He gives us their story of how they practically sold nothing for 9 months and how they were able to grow from that.
When they say mindful chef, they really are mindful of their suppliers, where they source their ingredients from, the type of ingredients they use, all the way down to the amount of our customers. They send all over the UK and it would be great if you’d hear their story out.
About Mindful Chef
We are the healthy restaurant company and every single week we send all of the ingredients portioned to peoples’ homes so they can cook them out themselves; everything can be done in less than 30 minutes.
We are the first company to do that, as well as offer dairy free, gluten free, and vegan options. When we set it up, we wanted to make sure we were as inclusive as possible for everyone. We don’t use any refined carbs like white pasta, white bread, and definitely no processed ingredients. We do more real vegetables and organic ingredients.
Have you seen an increase in Vegan recipe boxes?
Sure. We started offering our vegan options about 2 years ago. We call them plant-based. I’d say the percentage of people getting the vegan box isn’t anywhere near as high as people getting meat and fish or a combination. We found our previous customers started adding in a vegan meal every week since it’s an easy way for them to experience this way of eating without thinking what can I eat?
What is your business superpower?
It’s simply making healthy eating easy. People are more aware of healthy eating and living and everyone wants to try and do that but for most people it’s a bit too much effort. They don’t have the time and we try to make it really convenient and easy for them and at the same time it’s of the highest quality.
How does Mindful Chef engage its staff, suppliers, and customers with its mission and purpose?
A lot of our staff came in just offering help and just wanted to get involved in the whole project, which might have changed how food is actually bought by consumers. Instead of food going to supermarket warehouses we get them direct from the farms to you and it’s reducing food waste. This is something that lots of people get a high.
A lot of customers who come to us have been referred to us or have followed us on social media or have engaged with the brand first, so we’re lucky that they’re already quite engaged in the business’ mission.
We also have a value session at the beginning of the year where we discuss who we want to be and where we want to go.
For the suppliers, we make sure to go and meet all of the suppliers ourselves and make sure that everything is according to our standard.
What has been your biggest struggle when it comes to running an ethical and sustainable business and how have you overcome it?
We haven’t overcome it yet but getting to profitability is probably the first one. When you’re buying high quality ingredients and when it’s fresh food and it’s healthy it just costs more. Our protein element is on average about 25% bigger than the other sellers and with that comes smaller profit margins.
We’re also trying to tackle packaging. Our boxes are fantastic for food waste. About 1/3 of food is wasted globally and in UK it’s about 7.3 million tones every year. It’s fantastic because there’s no wastage at the end of week for food.
If you could offer ONE piece of advice to our listeners which could help them with their purpose what would that be?
I would advise more people to set up the beliefs of what they want the company to stand for at the beginning of their business journey and not when they’re deep into it.
Can you tell us how you approach environmental management and your carbon footprint?
We’re a small team of about 15 and environmental impact has always been on our minds but we’ve never dedicated one set person to it. It’s been within the last 6 months that I’ve dedicated myself to look at that side of the business like how we deal with the packaging, the carbon footprint and foot print is in terms of our suppliers, delivery, ingredients and all those things.
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