We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Barry Fourie a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Barry, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

As far as taking a risk goes in business, you tend to make the leap because you believe the benefit of a taking a chance, or as in our case, making a change will outweigh the risk. It’s a scary thing at times, but can be refreshing and motivating as well.

In the case of our business, we took a leap to make a brand change within the same sector that were operating in, meal prep direct to consumers. EatFlavorly was initially called Healthy Gourmet Your Way, with a focus on creating healthy recipes ready to heat and enjoy, plus customizable menu based on dietary needs. At the time we launched in 2018, the market had already been around for a few years in a big way, but was quickly becoming saturated.

All the while, we have always been a talented team of creative cooks and business people, who felt we could further our success by letting go of a hyper diet focused image, and simply making well balanced, tasty options for busy people. It seems a small change, but was quite a leap both in a name change, and the way to create and promote our products. We already had an existing client base that was 2 years old, and didn’t want to alienate loyal purchasers, but knew that it was a calculated risk in clearing a better path forward for our family business to thrive.

Now, EatFlavorly is focused on cooking the best tasting ready to eat meals on the market, and providing excellent customer service in order to find and retain fans of what we do. As we are no subscription, which is less common than a subscription model, we have to push ourselves to craft new and interesting dishes to keep our customers coming back, and making sure they a re always satisfied with our ordering and delivery process.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

EatFlavorly is a meal prep service that creates quality, well balanced meals with a focus on creativity and quality, rather than diet and weight loss. We are for busy professionals, empty nesters, college students, new parents, basically anyone who does want to or have the time to cook, but still demands a well balanced, home-made meal.

We have a ton of variety, with new items being launched constantly, and offer easy no subscription ordering with fast delivery. Our meals and products are vacuum sealed, and frozen, locking in freshness that refrigerated meals can’t compete with, especially after they are a few days old!

EatFlavorly is a family owned and run business, based in Houston and delivering nationwide. We give back in our community by working through our families charity, Clothed By Faith, who provides gently used clothing to families in need across the greater Houston area. We also work with other charities on a case by case basis to help meet food insecurity needs through meal donations.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We manufacture all of our products (meals) in house from scratch, from prepping, cooking to packaging as well as fulfillment. As we scale, we would potentially outsource fulfillment, but will always make our own products to keep quality and creative control close to the hip.

I have been a chef for many years, 12+, and have held positions in various kitchens and started food truck and restaurant businesses with my dad, but really fell in love with food manufacturing and the challenges it presents. Having a culinary background helps, but there is definitely a science to creating food products consistently and safely. It’s a good opportunity to feed your nerdy side, and still be flexible enough to be creative and fun. After all, we create food, which should bring joy and sustenance, not medical supplies…

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is being proactive as a small business operator to calculate for handover of your process. You start off by doing everything yourself, and then need to hire and train staff in order to grow and leave previously owned tasks to others. This is incredibly difficult, and will lead to employee frustration (and turnover) if you cannot pass the torch through systems and/or processes you have developed unique to your operation. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, and still see the need to stay organized and clear on instructions daily.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Being a direct to consumer business, we constantly need to win clients and customers by letting our selling machine work 24/7, this is accomplished by being an e-commerce business. Standard practice ohs to scale with ads and make sure your ALV and retention carries you forward, but the best source of new customers for us has been trough referrals and word of mouth. With digital marketing, it seems that you can sometimes just throw money down a hole and hope for the best, but doing a good enough job that your customers tell others and feel the need to review your product positively, is worth much more. We do both, but will ultimately succeed because of our loyal fans.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.eatflavorly.com
• Instagram: @eatflavorly
• Facebook: @eatflavorly
• Youtube: EatFlavorly

Image Credits
These are all our own images and have the rights to them.