We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mary Drennen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Mary , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
Truthfully, I’m an entrepreneur by accident. Back in 2012, I was doing freelance recipe development and food styling for various publishing clients. One of the projects I worked on was a Paleo cookbook, which was the diet craze of the time. The author, who I knew quite well, called me up randomly one day and said, “The gym I belong to is looking for a chef to provide healthy, Paleo meal plans to the clients every week. Since you know how to cook the Paleo diet, I recommended you.”
Keep in mind, back in 2012, food delivery was limited to pizza and Chinese. The large meal kit companies were just starting out, and so while I thought getting Paleo meals delivered to a gym was a little strange, I agreed I could certainly pull it off. I looked at it more as a “side hustle.”
In late December of 2012, I launched my first menu for the 4 gyms in our local area. With the help of 2 hourly employees, we cooked and delivered 400 meals that week. The orders doubled week-after-week and by January 2013, I was overwhelmed with the excitement and opportunity in front of me.
Mary , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
While I have a degree in English literature, I knew from a very early age that my passion was cooking. As a Southerner, I grew up on a stool in my mother’s kitchen, watching her create beautiful dishes, prepared with family and community in mind. We ate dinner as a family, and bonded over shared love of Southern cuisine. However, it wasn’t until I was in college, that I thought I could turn my passion into a career. My mother encouraged me to work in restaurants during my summers off and weekends, while I was still in college at Washington & Lee. As an 18 year old girl, working the back-of-house at a busy restaurant, I quickly learned ALOT about the culinary industry and how it operates. Long nights, lots of weekends, and a mostly male workforce.
Three weeks after graduating from Washington & Lee, I moved myself to NYC to start culinary school and my journey began. After a few years in NYC, I applied for a test kitchen position at Cooking Light magazine, which was based in my hometown. The perfect marriage of culinary creativity and a desirable work schedule, I was thrilled to accept the role and put down roots in Birmingham. Developing and testing healthy recipes for the Cooking Light reader was a dream job for me. But little did I know that my 5 years there were laying the foundation for my business today.
During my time there, I met Tiffany Davis, another test kitchen developer and we developed a deep friendship, but also a drive to take our culinary creativity to the next level. We launched a small, boutique catering company to service high-end dinner parties and corporate events. It was our first foray into entrepreneurship and taught us both so much about serving our clients needs, high-volume production and what it TAKES to run a profitable food business.
For the last 10 years, we have operated Nourish Foods. We create, produce and deliver high-quality, fully prepared meals to our clients’ doorsteps each and every week. Between work, kids, balancing schedules and the busy-ness of life, time has become our most valuable, and limited, resource. We saw a need in the market for our meals and had the expertise to provide that for our clients. When you have a Nourish meal in the fridge, mealtime is healthy and stress-free.
Most everyone has tried a meal delivery service over the last few years. Whether a meal kit or a local grab and go shop, the options are everywhere. What makes Nourish unique in a crowded space is our commitment to our products. Unlike the larger companies, everything we deliver is still handmade by a team of trained chefs in our Birmingham, AL kitchen. Our menu rotates each week, so there are 10-12 new meals to try (while our larger competition sells mass produced meals, with an evergreen menu for economies of scale). And I believe the most impactful difference is that Tiffany and I still operate and work in the business 5 days a week. Outsourcing your meal preparation is a personal choice and I believe that our clients purchase from our brand because we are just like them. Two hardworking women, also short on time, that want to eat healthy and provide nutritious meals for their families, without all the effort.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
After 10 years of being an entrepreneur, I can say with certainty that adapting to changing customer wants and diversifying your income streams is the only path to success. The businesses that cannot be nimble and pivot quickly will fail. Here’s 2 examples (of the many times we have pivoted):
Our first 2 years in meal delivery, we produced Paleo meals exclusively for a franchise of fitness facilities. And while we learned a lot about meal production and last mile in those first 2 years, we were operating under a Vendor Supply Agreement with 1 LARGE client (the gym). Each week the gyms we serviced would send in a weekly meal order and we would produce and deliver to that gym. We never took the transaction; we didn’t have the customer list; we didn’t have any of the data, which we now know to be SO valuable. Over those 2 years, we had many potential clients reach out and say “I’d like to receive these meals, but I don’t belong to the gym, so how can I order from you?” So we began to develop our own website and own branding to sell meal DTC (direct-to-consumer). In late 2014, during our annual health dept. inspection, one of the inspectors realized that the way we were selling to the gyms would put us under USDA jurisdiction, and thus we were forced to take all of the transactions and orders online (instead of through the bulk gym orders). While this was a painful pivot, it forced us to take the steps necessary to move our business in the right direction.
Our second pivot happened during the covid pandemic. At that time 99% of our revenue was through our ecommerce platform, NourishMeals.com. We offer fresh meals via weekly subscription and at the time were doing quite well in that business, not knowing what was about to come. During the first week of pandemic shut-down, we were asked to join civic and community partners to discuss the issues that could arise because of covid19 and come up with solutions for those problems. Everything in that meeting was a ?, but food insecurity was a large problem that the city government was considering, especially for school-age kids and the elderly population. Since our expertise at Nourish is in high-volume food production and last mile delivery, the solution for us was simple. We could produce lower-cost meals for the insecure populations and deliver directly to their doorsteps. Later that month, when the need became apparent, we were called upon by many government, civic and community partners to deliver on our capacilities. And 2+ years later, we still work hand in hand with Meals on Wheels to provide senior citizens in our 5 county area with fully prepared, low-sodium meals to meet their needs. Prior to the pandemic, we never would have considered producing a lower-cost, frozen product, but our eyes were opened to new opportunities to provide meals (at every price point).
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
On the rollercoaster of owning a small business, there will be growth years and there will be down years. It’s unpredictable, stressful and will test the limits and abilities of any entrepreneur.
In one particularly challenging time in our business, I believe it was 2015, just after we had been shut down by the USDA and forced to set up our own e-commerce platform to start taking orders online. Our sales took a HUGE hit and 2015 was a big rebuilding year for us. In late Dec 2014, I found out I was pregnant with identical twin boys. Being pregnant and working in a hot commercial kitchen on your feet all day is very very difficult. Unfortunately, in March of that year, I was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder called Twin-to-Twin-Transfusion and required emergency surgery in Cincinnati and bed rest following until the twins arrived. So for many months of that year (they arrived healthy in late May), I sat in a recliner in our office and did all of the administrative tasks instead of working in the kitchen or packing boxes with the logistics team. It was during that time that I had close eyes on our revenue and the ability to set aside dedicated time for business development/sales. I have always had a strength in sales, so business dev and BIG ideas come naturally for me. I decided I would use my bedrest to build back our revenue to prior year sales #, but it wasn’t going to be easy. I researched and cold called and emailed 10000 of potential “larger volume” clients. One I reached out to (the largest meal scheduler in the country) actually got back to me and set up a call for the following week. I was ecstatic and prepared a capability pitch deck, did tons of market research and put on my sales hat.
However, the Saturday before the scheduled call, my water broke in the middle of the night! So my husband and I raced down to the hospital and were admitted into L&D. Since I had previously had the TTTS surgery in Cincinnati, my water breaking was not a HUGE surprise, but did require me to stay in the hospital until the twins arrived. My husband drove home alone, packed up my hospital bag, my laptop and all my prepared materials for the BIG sales call on Monday. Two days later, I took the call from my hospital bed, with the beeping monitors in the background, and closed the deal with the meal scheduler – luckily this was way before the days of Zoom calls!
And 4 days later, my twins arrived at 29 weeks – both happy and healthy.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nourishmeals.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marydrennen/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@marydrennen
Image Credits
Photo credits: Catherine Mayo and Stephen Devries