Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Holly Stein. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Holly, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My first postpartum was a struggle. We value high-quality organic foods but had very little food prepped for postpartum. People brought us food, while well intentioned, was not what we wanted to eat. I was also eating the WRONG foods (cold, raw, dry crunchy foods like smoothies, salads, chips, etc). My husband tried to cook as much as possible, but those times early postpartum are SO HARD. I was constipated, feeling blah all the time, and we really struggled.

For baby #2 I swore things would be different. I researched what our ancestors did postpartum. I read philosophies from Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and Weston A. Price. I learned the best foods to eat postpartum are warm, soft, nutrient-dense and easy-to-digest meals like soups, stews, broths, and congee. We prepped about 60meals following these principles and froze them to have ready for postpartum.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE. Literally night and day. I felt nourished, supported, safe, and like I was being wrapped in a warm hug at every meal. My husband didnt have to cook and clean, and we spent so much more time bonding as a family, even with a toddle running around. A few months later I meal-prepped for a couple of friends who were having babies, and they both said it was one of the greatest things anyone had ever done for them.

We had friends who were doulas and midwives, and they begged us to create this business. So Mama Meals was born, out of our home kitchen with a couple stock pots and a stand up freezer in the garage.

Holly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Growing up I was sick all the time. I had debilitating gut issues, was anxious/depressed, and every trip to the doctor seemed to conclude with another prescription, and no real answers. In my mid-twenties, right around the time I met my future husband, I started learning about how Food is Medicine. We traded nights out at the bars and eating junk food for nights in watching food-documentaries and kombucha.

We tried basically every diet out there, and finally realized there a core principle that transends all diets. We stopped asking how many calories does the food have, or how many grams of carbs. Instead we asked how many ingredients does it have? How were the animals treated and what were they fed? Were the plants sprayed with poison to kill bugs and weeds? We slowly transitioned to a diet that more closely resembles what our great-great grandparents ate. Real, clean food.

Our life changed in ways we couldn’t imagine. My gut issues began to disappear, I got off anti-anxiety/depression meds, lost a bunch of weight, while my husbands life-long allergies and gut issues disappeared. As strange at is sounds, we began to feel younger as we got older.

At Mama Meals we take these foundational principles and create warm, soft, easy-to-digest meals using the cleanest most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. Postpartum is one of the hardest but also most important times in life to eat real food, so we see ourselves as part of your village, making sure you’re nourished and supported. Plus mamas tend to keep ordering long past their 4th trimester because who doesn’t want to have meals like this cooked and ready to serve? =)

How’d you meet your business partner?

My co-founder is my husband Eric. We went to the same highschool but didnt know each other. He was working at a local resort and I owned a wedding planning business so I always saw him when meeting with clients and doing weddings. We were both at the beginning of our personal wellness journeys. The early days dating were filled with food documentaries like Food Inc where we learned about what it meant to eat real food.

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

We started Mama Meals out of the kitchen in our house! Wowza, what a journey. We are VERY conscious of our food choices and cook 95+% of our meals at home already. We started with two 3-gallon stock pots and our tiny oven. We’d cook a soup, let it cool, portion into containers, then fill up the stand-up freezer in the garage. We were pickup only, so we would often have to wait for customers to come by and get their food before we could cook again for our next orders.

We would get 13-15 containers per batch. We were always. behind, cooking for orders that had already been placed, apologizing almost weekly for not having the food ready yet.

Basically we ran a food manufacturing business out of an already busy home kitchen. We are in the process now of finding someone who can produce the food at a bigger scale up to our standards.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mama-meals.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eat.mamameals/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mamameals/