Prep to Profit Podcast - Grow your Meal Prep Business - Building Golden Roots with Melanie Geist

[00:00:08] Andy Blechman: So lots to talk about Melanie. We just had everyone introduce themselves. You got set up and I'm very excited to have you here.

I couldn't be more thrilled. Melanie and I have known each other for at least six years.

[00:00:24] Melanie Geist: I think so. Yeah.

[00:00:26] Andy Blechman: Yeah. I remember our first conversation when we were talking about your meal prep business. I remember where I was, what we were talking about. That's so funny. The

[00:00:34] Melanie Geist: same room right now where we had our first meeting.

That

[00:00:37] Andy Blechman: is incredible. I wish I was in the same room. I, at the time was sitting with my co founder in a hotel room in Bracken Ridge.

Nice.

[00:00:45] Andy Blechman: We had just left a meeting with another client who is still on the platform based in Colorado. And we were just talking to you to learn about your business. It's been amazing to have so many conversations with you over the years and really watch your business grow. And thank you so much for offering to do this. We have people from Arizona and Connecticut and I think I saw Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas so we have people from everywhere. Tuned in today.

I'm excited to learn from your hard won lessons. With that I guess I'll start with just maybe breaking the ice. We do call these the Bottle Coffee Chat and to many of our users, we do send them coffee. It's a little late for me. It's one o'clock. I just have my very fun purple water bottle with water in it today.

But it'd be great to hear about your morning routine. What are you, what kind of. Coffee. Do you drink? If you drink coffee, what kind of products do you use? How do you get your day started? As just the first question, before we dive into your business.

[00:01:45] Melanie Geist: Yeah. Oh my gosh, my mornings look really crazy.

Now I have a toddler, a 2-year-old and boxers and a husband at home. So the morning now generally looks like running after them and they require a lot of cuddles and pets in the morning. And then just trying to get everybody fed. Get my own cup of coffee. I love coffee, but I have to really keep it in check.

So I try. I actually drink my coffee out of my grandmother's China cup, which is exactly 1 cup. And that's how I keep myself in check. But, yeah, I love to explore different single origin. coffees. We have so many options here, so I feel like I bounce around a lot, but I do like the sweetened vanilla oat milk.

I feel like it's just nice to go down easy in the morning.

[00:02:34] Andy Blechman: Yeah, it's a little treat, just a little treat to start you off. Cool. Let's dive into it. I'd love to hear tell us about your business. Tell us about Golden Roots. We, I'd love to hear, maybe you can start with what was it that led you to want to start this business?

And I think it'd be helpful for people to know a little bit about the Santa Cruz community, but also just like, where did this passion for meal delivery come from and what led you down this path?

[00:03:00] Melanie Geist: Yeah gosh, so many little steps led me here. But mostly I was in my mid twenties and really exploring health and wellness.

I had finished university, studied international relationship or international relations, thought I would be, on the ground building peace somewhere in the Middle East and realized, what was going to feel good and serve me. And I think my community better was really just to dive into community and really work on fundamentals and figure out what it was that build strong community and healthy people.

And yeah, I w I was on my own health journey. I was, I knew I had some digestive issues and some health issues that seemed all linked back to food, or I really believe deeply that food could be the medicine and. So I started exploring that independently and then ended up at Bowman College, which is a really alternative culinary program that focuses on eating for health.

So it was a very nutrition oriented and really learning how what kind of issues most people in the community face that are food oriented or supported by food and how to serve them. And I actually was introduced to a business called Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley that had a meal service.

Different model, but it definitely inspired me that this was a way that I could scale my offering. A lot of people that came out of my program were doing private cheffing. And I explored that a little bit, but I knew that I really wanted to build a business and see how to, leverage my skills and offer them more broadly to the community at hopefully a price that, more people could afford.

So it was really just a desire to. To dive in and be of service to community and and see how I could serve and support other people. And also myself, because, I am customer number one of my business. I really depend on it, make sure that I'm well fed and my family's well fed. It seemed I would always at least have, one client interested. That's right.

[00:04:54] Andy Blechman: Yeah, it's funny. I ran a meal prep business in Atlanta too, and I find myself time and again that's how we got to Bottle. And I find myself time and again, pulling up the recipes. I didn't create them. I'm not a chef. But I did have a chef build a beautiful group of about 22 recipes.

And I find myself, Still using those recipes and it's like amazing that your client number one of your own business and how much joy you get out of that. I want to go back to the, your grandmother's China cup. I feel like I also do this with mugs and maybe other people do too, where you have a mug, like the mug has meaning beyond, Just a cup of whatever you're having in it.

And, for me, it's often a place I've been, or, a hotel I've stayed at. I'm curious for you, when you think about like cooking, is cooking something, did your grandmother cook? Is, what is like the meaning of food in your early life that kind of led you to a place like Bauman and feel like, okay instead of, maybe doing work in international relations, I want to be at something as visceral as food, like, where did this start for you?

In your life.

[00:05:56] Melanie Geist: Yeah, I definitely have food in my ancestry as. So many of us do. But yeah, my, my mom is Greek and Polish. And I think a lot of my love of food comes from her and her mom, my Yaya. And they love to feed people, but it was generally like banquets of sweets.

Like my mom at Christmas puts out a dessert table of no less than 15 different, Different sweets, all kinds. That was really her love was baking. And yeah, I grew up definitely understanding that you show your love for people and you welcome people with food. And. That meant a lot to me, and it's definitely I have to hold back because I feel like I'm always pressuring people to eat and realizing, that it's not always my place to do that.

That let people eat when they want but feeding people is definitely feels like a natural way to show love and bring people together.

[00:06:54] Andy Blechman: Very cool. I love that. And I'm curious, just a little bit of background. I think we spoke in your somewhat early days, but remind me. The trajectory of the business and how long have you all been in business and it also would be cool to hear just a little bit about what's your food philosophy.

What is, how do you think about the food that you're making and how has that evolved?

[00:07:15] Melanie Geist: Yeah. So we are eight years old and things have really the foundation of the business is really about sourcing really high quality sourcing and cooking from scratch, which is something that is just.

amazingly lost in our culture right now. And that's what was striking me when I was going to start the businesses. I was just looking around at the food paradigm of the contemporary world and it just didn't make sense. And it was clearly making us sick. On one hand it's feeding the people and, it's reduced starvation in a huge way, which is incredible, but also was leading to all of these other problems.

So I really set out to evaluate what those issues were and how how people were solving them. And that really came back to roots. I started finding practitioners of all different kinds that were studying, ancient cultures, or at least long standing cultures and what their food philosophies were.

And a lot of it came back to soaking and sprouting and the preparation methods of food and grains. There were so many fad diets happening. For as long as I can remember, there's always been some kind of a food fad that we were following. And it seemed like every fad that people found success in within 10 years, people were, doctors were saying like, this will kill you.

And it just seemed to me that there had to be something more fundamental, something more basic that would make sense and allow people to eat to build to a relationship with food that they could then hold, for their whole life. So it really came back to yeah, eating whole food, eating a variety of food, trying to eat seasonally.

Of course, eating organic eating high quality oils and fats. And really carefully sourcing animal proteins and trying to make that, trying to make fiber like the main, the driver of meals. And yeah, it really became a love to try to figure out how local I could source and we are just so lucky to live in just the food belt of the country here in Santa Cruz.

And that was one of the reasons, I was looking for where I wanted to settle. I put down my own roots and decided on the Santa Cruz area because, at a baseline, there was already a really good understanding of the importance of eating healthy food. It wasn't starting at square 1, which the community of teaching them what healthy food was and why it mattered.

People already understood that. They just really needed support in getting there. It's also 1 of the. The busiest areas in the country where most people have dual incomes, so there isn't somebody at home who's providing the meals and who's really dedicated to that task, which I think in, traditionally in most cultures, that's a big part of somebody's job at home was making sure that there was healthy, food to eat for the family.

So that was clearly like a gap in the modern paradigm that I was hoping to fill. And that's really where I focus. Honestly, I learned how to cook through the service. So the first five years, I would say three to five years of building Golden Roots, I was becoming a chef. I just finished my culinary program.

And like I said, it was very alternative. It was only, nine months. So I came out feeling like I had a lot to learn. So I really dived into recipes. And my favorite chef was Yotam Otolenghi from London. And so my recipes were very complicated. There were lots of ingredients and tons of herbs and spices.

But that's really how I love to cook and felt like I could really introduce people to new foods and keep it exciting. So, um, Yeah, I mean, the member, we, I started off in my kitchen at home and then ended up renting space out of a shared kitchen space and eventually ended up in a kitchen that I shared and then slowly the other tenants like moved out and I took over the whole space

[00:10:57] Andy Blechman: That's great.

Which part of your questions haven't I answered? Yeah I, no that's fantastic. I think it'd be cool to talk a little bit about how. There's so much in here to unpack and hopefully we can get to all of it. And I already see there's some questions coming in. I think it'd be really cool to unpack.

My 1st question is, how have you maintained the integrity? Perhaps you can tell us a little bit without revealing numbers, but tell us a little bit about kind of the size of your business when you started. Obviously, it was. Out of your own kitchen to now having a whole production facility, which tells me that you're, you have a fairly large meal prep business now.

How do you think about sourcing and how are you maintaining integrity? I'm sure people would love to hear maybe a little bit about not only how do you keep, I love Otolenghi too. And just, going to cook one of his recipes this week, but obviously scaling that and meal prep must be challenging.

How are you maintaining both integrity in your sourcing? You're rotating your menu every week. Talk a little bit about the scaling journey, how you source that, anything you've learned about sourcing, anything you've learned around production as you've grown into now having your own full facility yourself.

[00:12:03] Melanie Geist: Yeah, sourcing is so key. You can't make great food out of poor ingredients. So you really do have to start there. And I started off shopping at, the best local grocery store that would give me a catering discount that had organic, produce. But as I grew and had a little bit more buying power, I was able to build better connections with farms and the farmer's market is honestly the best resource, I think, for a chef we have incredible farmer's markets most days of the week in the area, and just shopping those markets and seeing what they have, what's available, and then trying to build a menu off of that it allows you to, To know where you're going to get your ingredients.

So thinking that through 1st, when you're building out the food, and then also just setting that integrity. I think I had a really clear vision of what that meant in terms of sourcing and what was. The mission of the business, and to me, if I wasn't able to fill that mission then it wasn't worth pursuing the business.

So it was just a really clear line for me. I definitely didn't get in into this business because I wanted to be really wealthy. I think if anyone is on that mission with food, they might be in the right, wrong industry. So for me I knew that I was going to put a high level or a high importance on integrity and then just kept bringing that back through.

If something wasn't going to work because it was going to be too expensive to offer this local pasture raised chicken I thought, okay what's another way that we can offer it. When we started off we were just buying whole birds and then mostly using them to strip and do pulled chicken.

And then that way we could also have the bones that we would make stocks from. So we were being able to get more, bang for our buck out of the product. And then offer, the protein in a smaller portion that you might. Find, at a typical restaurant where you're getting like, half of a chicken or like a really large thigh.

So thinking about portion size and really trying to like, compose the meal in a way that would make sense financially. And what I realize is that those boundaries, and if you let that guide you, it's also Gonna tell you what the world will support. So I know there's a lot of people right now who are really protein focused and are really finding a lot of success on eating mostly all animal protein.

And I've seen how that can be valuable for people in different situations. But then if you look at what it would. Cost or require of the world. To support that it's not feasible. And so that kind of tells me like, okay then if this isn't, if this isn't in alignment with the environment, then it can't be the way that we're supposed to eat.

So trying to work, with the natural forces rather than against them and be willing to accept that, your product isn't going to be for everyone. You're going to find your niche by holding true to your integrity and letting your product. for itself. And that grew. So when I maybe had 10 people tha and friends of friends wh some meal support th for.

And

[00:15:07] Andy Blechman: I'm gonna s I think this is want to learn. So you say with 10.

What was

[00:15:17] Andy Blechman: this? H As a starting point, and maybe we can walk the journey of, 10 to 100 and 100 to where, I'd love to hear what the evolution was and some of the whatever you think the step functions were as your maybe you compare it with and you grew in kitchen size.

I always feel like that's like a nice parallel. But yeah, how did you get your 1st 10? And then how did you take the next step in the business and the next step in the business? Because I think we have a lot of folks who are either like, Dave's asked a question here. I know he's just starting off.

We also have folks who are where you were three years ago. And so I think everyone can learn from your journey a little bit here.

[00:15:49] Melanie Geist: Yeah, the first 10 were really just reaching out through my contact list. I also, I had a co founder, Martina, who started the business with me. And so it was between our contacts and then the other people that I knew in the community.

And I just told them about what I was offering and asked them. Ask them if they had any friends that would be interested and ask them to be the ambassador. So to reach out, ask if it was okay to give them our contact information. And then I think we were just doing things through, I think it was through text.

Maybe initially and then move to email. We started off with Shopify site that was really clunky. So we were diverting people through that initially once, that was actually step two. I think step one was maybe like a texted out menu and then step two was we built a Shopify site and had a menu on that.

And at that point, once. Once we honestly moved past 12 or 15 clients, I lived, I had a small house that I shared with two other roommates that we were cooking out of. So we moved into that shared commercial space. And actually that was a great opportunity because that was the first exposure I had to other people who were running businesses, mostly catering businesses.

But great women that really gave me advice about where they were sourcing and how they were taking steps how they had grown their businesses and specific tools they used for different things. So started making connections, in the industry and really valuing those relationships.

And then, from that kitchen space it was just word of mouth. We had, we, we had an Instagram account and you can scroll back to the very beginning of our Instagram and you can see how DIY and unprofessional it was. We didn't know anything about photography and none of that would fly now.

But yeah, just, trying to have a presence on Instagram to start connecting with clients. And really, I put 100 percent of my attention into the product. So my feeling was is if I had a great product and a great service, then it would speak for itself and that people would be the ambassadors of that product and share.

Their experience with other people and that was going to be the most powerful way for somebody to find out about our business. And, a little while later as meal prep services became more popular, I learned about churn and just how much money these huge, national businesses were spending.

We're spending on client acquisition. And I think that's a place where if you're bootstrapping and you're, a small business without that kind of funding you really can't afford to do that. But I also think that's an incredible opportunity because you're not going to run before you can walk.

And I think. Get being able to build your business slowly and build your product, build your product first before you outlay a bunch of cash on bringing people to your product is a way to really build a strong foundation. And that's what I found. And it was a slow growth, but when I look back at the trends, aside from a few years that were like, the anomaly years of the pandemic we were on a steady pace.

steady growth of 20 percent a year, which is small, especially when you're talking about starting with 10 15 clients. But it was steady and allowed me to learn a lot of aspects of the business because I, you have to learn how to do everything. First, you have to learn how to become a chef.

Then you have to learn how, to scale and actually manage a kitchen. And then you have to learn how to hire and manage employees, which were just my friends. To start. And then you realize, okay, I need to find people who are really professional in this industry. And so it took, that was a big step and a big challenge to figure out my footing there.

And it's hard to attract, qualified individuals when you're a small business, especially in the food industry. You know, A lot of people are looking for the hot new restaurant or they have aspirations to work for a Michelin's. Star chef. And, I was never gonna be that opportunity.

So I had to find the people that were gonna serve my business and that were gonna enjoy growing with me. So I think by the time I was in my third commercial kitchen and I had switched from. I moved from my first commercial kitchen to my second only because the building was changing over, but it was actually a good opportunity in the second kitchen, because I really saw they had more built out facility and a tilt skillet more ovens, and I really saw how much you could leverage your labor with the right equipment and really get so much more productivity out of the day and then eventually I saw that I was Spending as much renting this kitchen space as I would, getting in on a lease with some other business owners.

And so we made that transition and I'm not sure how many clients I had at that point. I have to dig into my Bottle because it's right about when we transitioned with you, but maybe 50 it was still really small. That was a big jump because. Actually, I found you Andy, because Martina was transitioning out of the business.

She was becoming a mom and, setting her sights and I'm going to put her energy towards that. And she had really been handling a lot of the administrative work of getting the orders together and getting them out to the clients. And I was still all in and on the kitchen being chef and recipe builder and shopper.

And I really needed a way to manage that aspect of the business more efficiently. And that was going to allow me to grow without selling. Spending too much time on it. And so she actually suggested Bottle and that we take a meeting. And as soon as I saw the software, I really realized that, yes, this was a solution that actually would allow for growth and.

It took a big outlay as all of these steps do an investment of time to make it work for my business for my model. And to learn the system. I'm not a technology oriented person at all. I would much rather have my hands in the soil or in the food than on the computer, but I saw that it was just a critical way.

To move forward in this industry and that was going to be a huge tool. So taking that leap was really big. And as soon as people started using the platform, they, responded, Oh, it's streamlined. You have your outliers who always have, struggle with change, but for the most part, especially for my demographic, which is really 30 to 50 is, people who are exposed, who are using technology they really got it really easily and really appreciated that all of their, credit card information was stored and it just made the process much more streamlined. Visually was more appealing. And from there, I think people felt a lot more comfortable referring their friends started a referral program and it was just easier for people to find us and sign up.

And and we saw a big growth in business that was also at the same time as when we got our own commercial kitchen space. So I was actually able to put a sign up in front of the building and that's not to be underestimated in terms of the power. I think we got a huge bump in clientele just because were

[00:22:46] Andy Blechman: you in an area where people were driving by a lot or.

Visible area. That's so

[00:22:52] Melanie Geist: interesting

[00:22:52] Andy Blechman: for not having the end. Do you have retail? Do you open up a little retail? So it's just the signage.

[00:22:57] Melanie Geist: No retail, just signage. And I think it was just in a community, Scott's Valley, which is a part of Santa Cruz, but it's in the mountains a little bit and it's still developing.

There's a lot of wealth. There's tax really moving in there. But the food scene is there. Very minimal. And it's just a lot of strip malls. There's not really, been a good focus on development and I think people could just tell this is a fresh business. It seemed modern just by, looking at branding.

And so they were curious and they were coming in the door and asking like, what is this? Can I buy food? Or. The what's the service here? And so yeah, we just had promotional material that we were able to give out and because we were able to send them over to this like smooth platform right away it really allowed people to get on because even, you usually have to touch people a few times before they actually like, make the leap to, to to sign up, especially for our membership.

And I think right now we're in another area of growth. So the pandemic was its own thing where we saw just an explosion of growth there. Of course, it was such a hard time for so many businesses, and brought a lot of its own challenges. But we were really well positioned at that point to take advantage of the market change and the shift towards people wanting to have food delivered or be able to pick it up in one batch and take it home.

And then from there, this is, This industry has just really been normalized. When I started off, it was still kind of niche and only a few people, not most people weren't doing it or who had never tried a meal prep service. And then, after the pandemic, it's just, who hasn't tried a meal prep service.

Yeah,

[00:24:33] Melanie Geist: they certainly know what it is. And then back. And so at that point, I think we probably saw a 30 percent jump in business over the course of a few months. So figuring out how to scale at that point, and that's when I really looked towards the community also. It had been my goal all along to bring in other community members, other businesses.

So I started offering spots on my menu to catering businesses who wanted to make a few prepared meals or specific products or raw products like vegetables and juice. And things like that people could make and some of those businesses were using our kitchen to make it.

And some of them were making it and then bringing it. So just opening it up and that was a good opportunity to just build community. Eventually I scaled that back because financially and for most of those businesses, they were, they went back to their regular, Service model, but it really showed me, where there was profit in the business, what people were interested in.

1 of the awesome things about having a membership like this is that you have access immediately every week to a clientele that you can test things out on. You're curious, are people going to spend 12 dollars on an 8 ounce kimchi? Let's put it on the menu and see if they buy it and see what happens.

Can that be sustained? Can you put juice on the menu week after week? And will they keep buying it? Try it for three months and see what the trend is and then make a move in your business to develop that model. So I think trying things out first with the membership before investing, like a big outlay of cash has been a big support

[00:26:09] Andy Blechman: Maybe you can tell us at that at this point exactly how you set your business up, how things have changed.

But, because a lot of our folks have a bit of a different model. Yeah. I think it'd be really interesting to hear about how you've thought about your business model specifically. And maybe I remember, I think one of the changes you decided to make when you joined our platform was to go subscription only.

And I know that probably has changed over time, but maybe you can talk a little bit about how the model works today, just to give us some context and then. Do you want to ask a few more questions around growth or make sure I heard you on the growth stuff, but yeah, it'd be helpful to hear the business model.

[00:26:48] Melanie Geist: Yeah, that was a huge shift. Yeah, when we started, just like I said, with the Shopify platform, it was only opt in and, we saw how after cutoff, there would be like a bunch of people reaching out still and trying to place orders. And that, a bunch of people, when they would come in to receive their food would tell us oh, yeah, I have a hard time remembering.

I wish I could order every week, but I keep missing the deadline. And when um, when you were first developing the software, there was only opt in or opt out, there wasn't really an in between. And so we had to make the call. Did we want to stay with the opt in method or go for the opt out?

And you had really, recommended that, You saw the value in the opt out. And I was nervous about it because I didn't want anyone to feel like they were being pressured or like we were tricking them or forcing them to order. I was trying to build relationships with people who I intended to support for years ideally.

Um, So I wanted them to feel comfortable with it. So when we made that transition to an opt out only we really tried to communicate thoroughly with everyone and at that point we, we were small, so we were able to have a lot of one on one interactions with people and then it really came down to customer service.

Once people had the cutoff experience and were auto charged based on their smart menu and data, We're upset for whatever reason, we were right on it to make sure that we were rectifying the situation, canceling the order, editing the order to make sure that they were satisfied in the end and knew that, we wanted to we wanted them to end up with whatever products or meals that they wanted and we were there to help them do it.

And, for people were mostly fine with that, but what I definitely noticed was that there was a hesitation from some people to sign up because they weren't interested in a membership that was opt out, which I can totally understand, especially before you get into something and really know what it is and have any kind of relationship with it.

It can be intimidating to sign up for something like that. And what we saw when we switched over back in January of this year to the 2.0 model, which allowed for both opt in and opt out tiers. Is that we saw the membership start growing a lot faster. So we have a lot more members in the opt in category now.

And, we had some transition of people transferring over from opt out to opt in. But I think that some of that Is positive in that those people might have been likely at some point to cancel their membership because they were frustrated with the model. And so the opt in serve them better for people that likes the model and we're using it successfully, they enjoyed they were letting it ride and stayed with the opt out method.

But now we just see, just again, word of mouth, but at a much higher rate each week, I'm like, oh, wow. Bye. 7 new clients again this week, and, we haven't posted on Instagram in weeks, but people are just finding us and because that barrier is lower and also because now they can go on and actually see the menu before they sign up for anything.

I think that's also made people made it more approachable. And then, when the time is right, they're still getting the menu each week. And maybe that, maybe it takes for 4 menu texts to get them to actually order. But it's a lot more likely that we actually bring them in as a client.

[00:30:09] Andy Blechman: That's awesome. And I guess I want to make sure I heard everything on the growth side because people, we could probably talk for another 2 hours, but yeah, I'm sure people want to understand this it concisely. It sounds like 1st 10 customers. Word of mouth, all network friends, family, anyone you could get from maybe 10 to, your 100 subscribers a lot of referral word of mouth.

And then the consistent thing throughout everything is just a obsessive focus on high quality product, but whether that's like how you source or how you produce and if, if people want to see If you go and look at your products, I haven't had the chance to taste it because I'm all the way in Atlanta, but it does seem like the quality of the product is so high.

That's what makes has led to this kind of referral based growth. It sounds like Instagram has helped obviously the physical signage, which is a nice little tip. That's actually pretty cool. And something I haven't heard before was helpful. Was there anything else, anything you can think of an inflection point outside of like the pandemic or any other growth strategy used on the marketing side that we didn't capture that.

Might be helpful for folks.

[00:31:10] Melanie Geist: Yeah. 1 other thing that I have found really successful is just making authentic connections in the community. I touched on that with just opening the menu up. But even beyond that hosting events we've had holiday holiday markets. Or pop ups like at the kitchen where we feature a local product but building actual like authentic connections in the community with people that are like minded with you that you want to support and like uplift generate some like genuine connection between your customers.

And I think people are really savvy at point like Picking out which things are just marketing and which things are like, Oh, these two businesses that I'm both interested are now working together and that tells them a lot about you. And I think, that's where I've chosen to spend my time.

When I'm trying to work on marketing is okay. Who can we work with in the community that is like minded because we know that we're going to want to connect with their people and do something valuable with them. And that's served as well.

[00:32:09] Andy Blechman: They're cool. Okay, I love that. It makes sense like in real life collabs it's why people enjoy going to a farmer's market, but there's like feeling of 2 authentic brands that are local.

You mentioned like the big peak, the big players, the factors and the cookies of the world. They have the big budget and they're spending on ads, which on 1 hand can be frustrating. On the other hand, it creates awareness. And then if you have this local, focus and local presence and you're sourcing locally and most importantly your food's better, ultimately that's how you can connect with your community.

And remind me, how big is your delivery radius? Are you delivering within 20 miles, 30 miles? Like how far do you guys go currently?

[00:32:48] Melanie Geist: Yeah, we actually just took a big leap in this past year or so. So we were doing servicing just the Santa Cruz area, which already is pretty spread out and includes some mountain communities.

I would say the radius of that is maybe 25 miles. But now we actually are sending our food north. So we were positioned right in the Santa Cruz mountains, and we're going all south. Now we're also going north, which is Los Gatos, where I just recently moved to and Campbell and Saratoga and South San Jose, which I just clearly identified as like a really rich market for our service again.

That just. In our target demographic. So I can see clearly that's why I haven't been too worried about marketing is just because I know the people are out there. And so it's just putting just little steps into the marketplace and then letting it grow on its own.

People want it. But yeah, so now, and my method there was just like casting a wide net. So I made some connections with some local people who are in the community and the health and wellness and they started telling people about the service. And, usually the way I do that is just to have them try the product, as I've.

Really hammered. Where I like to put my money where my mouth is. So giving them a box of our food, letting them try it. And then if they feel comfortable being an ambassador of the product then that's up to them. And that's worked really well, and they've become clients or their, their community has become integrated into ours and we just try to say yes to everyone. So we have a wonderful driver who's been willing to just, find all of these homes and then you never know who's going to be the connector to a new community. We're just letting it grow organically and seeing, which spots to concentrate on.

So I would say that's now we're in like a. 50 mile radius.

[00:34:41] Andy Blechman: Wow. I'm going to come back to logistics. We have about 15 more minutes. So we have some time. There's a bunch of questions from the community that I do want to get to all of them. I have to wrap up questions from my segment, and then we can go to Q&A and if we can fill it in as needed.

So I just am curious what's the most fun part of your day? What do you love the most about doing this work? Because you are so passionate about it. But what get what really brings you joy and doing this work?

[00:35:10] Melanie Geist: Meeting the seeing the clients on Tuesdays today is actually our pickup delivery day.

So getting to have some interaction with them and hearing them just like squeal with joy when they see their bag of food and feel how heavy it is, or handing them like a beautiful bouquet of flowers that we have on the menu this week. That's always, really uplifting especially when people bring their kids or their dogs and, their kids are, they tell us that what they're Their three year old likes the best.

That's really fun to hear about. But also, it's funny. I feel like The hardest parts are also the parts that bring the most joy. We've been in a leadership transition this summer, and I've had to step back into the kitchen a lot into production, which is a great opportunity, but also really challenging and, grinding it out with the team and just being there with them and seeing the struggles and the joy of finishing the day and the pride and those last steps of putting it all together and packing it and having it look beautiful.

And, there's just a lot of satisfaction and work that you've done with your hands. And yeah, even though it's hard I still find a lot of pleasure in that.

[00:36:16] Andy Blechman: That's amazing. Cool. And then what's one thing you wish you had known eight years ago that you would tell someone starting off today?

[00:36:25] Melanie Geist: Just that, all the little random explorations that you've had that you've done. Things you've spent time in or interests that you have. It's amazing. They're all going to coalesce into something that you can't picture right now, but they're all going to have value and, lessons learned that are going to manifest in a new way.

And yeah, you don't have to. To, give up all of these interests that you have to devote yourself to one thing. I think, there's space for them and they can be really valuable in whatever you're creating.

[00:36:57] Andy Blechman: Awesome. Okay. A ton of questions here. I'm going to try and find the ones that kind of fit.

We were just talking about logistics. , but let's start with kind of like the end of the process and we can work our way back. How do you handle the car? The actual management of a fleet. Do you own, we had a previous chat.

We had someone who he actually has 2 refrigerated vans and they use that for delivery. You mentioned you have a driver who's willing to go anywhere. How have you built out your delivery fleet and how do you handle that from a logistics perspective?

[00:37:28] Melanie Geist: Yeah. So starting out, I feel like there wasn't as many opportunities at outsourcing delivery.

So we started off keeping it in house. And as we grew it, that meant initially just 1 driver. And we would, send them off on 1 route. And then when that became too long to keep the food out that long, we would split it into two routes and then eventually that wasn't sufficient. So we hired another driver.

Now we have five or six drivers that go out. Most of them just take one route. Some of them come back and take two, and we split it up. Of course making sure that the integrity of the food is maintained. So trying to keep it out for as short of time as possible is important. But for us, we really felt like.

This is the only interaction that a lot of people have with the business at all, physical interaction is getting their food delivered to them. And even though a lot of that is contactless, even it's still important that happened in a seamless way. So when there became opportunities, in the last couple of years to outsource, I decided not to and keep it in house.

So we use Routific, which is like a routing mapping service to help us so we can download our deliveries and then it can help us break it out into routes. That's a really helpful tool that you can use to manage in house. But it still means that, we are maintaining the customer service, we're maintaining the interactions with the clients we're supervising the drivers and really, we just have more control over the whole process, if you blow that last step, the whole thing, it doesn't work.

It all

[00:38:57] Andy Blechman: falls apart. Yeah.

[00:38:58] Melanie Geist: Yeah. I didn't feel comfortable giving that part of the logistics off, taking it off my hands. So we've retained it.

[00:39:05] Andy Blechman: And these are driver, the drivers have their own cars because you're not doing refrigerated.

[00:39:09] Melanie Geist: Yeah.

[00:39:09] Andy Blechman: You happen to live in a milder climate.

I know you have a heat wave right now, but so it's easier. And these are drivers who you pay directly and they work part time. Accurate.

[00:39:19] Melanie Geist: That's correct. Yeah. They only work a day a week for us. And a lot of them work in other delivery, methods. So they're familiar with this contract work.

And yeah they take their own cars and we just, tailor their route how many that they can handle based on the driver and the.

[00:39:36] Andy Blechman: And Routific is a partner of Bottle for anyone listening and you want to, whether you're on Bottle or not they have a great platform. I think they are for, you know, I'd say anyone doing more than 100 drops a week.

It's a really great platform. I have found it to be quite effective and there's just a quick detail question here. How many, how do you charge for delivery? Are you using zoning? Are you is it by zip code? Like, how do you think about that? And how much do you typically charge? And also what's the cost to you for delivery.

[00:40:07] Melanie Geist: Yeah, we have a flat rate fee of 10 for delivery and that's something actually we've reexamined this year and really need to bump up to 12. we looked at maybe zoning it out and charging different amounts and I haven't made that final call yet, but oftentimes I feel like simplicity is best. So keeping things simple feels better.

That just covers our cost at 10. I would say we're a little we're. We're maybe losing a little bit. I think 12 would really cover it completely, but we're definitely not making any money on delivery.

[00:40:42] Andy Blechman: Okay, cool. And then do you just pay your drivers an hourly? Okay. So we pay.

[00:40:46] Melanie Geist: Yeah, we pay them a 5 drop

And then we reimburse them also for their mileage.

[00:40:52] Andy Blechman: Okay, got it. So that's where the economics start to get a little upside down.

[00:40:56] Melanie Geist: Yeah,

[00:40:56] Andy Blechman: got it. Okay, cool. And I guess shifting gears a little bit to sourcing. We have a larger meal prep company say asking, around they have around 200 looks like they're large. They're doing 200 pounds of chicken breast a week, and that's been a struggle To source from local farms.

That's my power flickers uh, any tips for someone who's at a larger volume sourcing proteins or vegetables. Cause you mentioned you, you built the relationship with the farmer, but I can't imagine maybe, or you're able to get all the products you need from a farmer's market now.

So how do you think about that large scale sourcing and either having multiple sources or, basically how do you keep it local at scale?

[00:41:36] Melanie Geist: Yeah. Yeah, that, that's a tough question and definitely, I, all businesses are going to face their own challenges depending on what their, yeah, regional location is.

For us, we actually faced the same challenge with our with our poultry suppliers that we were starting to outgrow that relationship a little bit. And so we did look at other larger brands and moved over some of our product to Mary's Organic, which is a national brand. And, 1st, we just tested the product.

We researched it to make sure that we were comfortable with the production and with the methods and compared what the ups and downs, the positives and negatives are of switching over to that product. And in the end, we decided to make the switch. We still work with the smaller producer to some extent, but it is hard when those painful growing pains happen.

I think finding a larger and I think this is changing all the time. There's so much more national awareness that there are more brands. becoming available. But we do have a purveyor. It's called Veritable Vegetable that works out of San Francisco, and they're really wonderful. They source almost 100 percent organic.

With most of your other purveyors, you have to ask them 10 times, is it organic? Don't send me unless it's organic. Working with a purveyor that really sources organic and you don't have to be having that conversation every week is really nice and they also introduced us to a lot of other brands that we were able to make local connections with other local farms that we were able to source.

But having, of course, 1, larger purveyor definitely streamlines things when you're working at scale. So I would encourage you to look for those other brands. U. S. foods is never going to be of service to us. Because they just don't have what we need.

[00:43:19] Andy Blechman: have to.

And you went, And you went direct to Mary's? Like you and you're getting a director? Or do they have, do they go through a distributor that you have to

[00:43:25] Melanie Geist: work with? We're working through a distributor. Yeah. I'm not sure

[00:43:29] Andy Blechman: local distribution company, or is it? No, it's a national.

[00:43:32] Melanie Geist: Yeah. Allen.

[00:43:32] Andy Blechman: Oh, it is.

[00:43:33] Melanie Geist: So yeah, that's, I think, but you knew the

[00:43:36] Andy Blechman: brand first and then you backed into the distributor versus the distributor bringing you the brand or did it work the other way?

[00:43:43] Melanie Geist: We knew the brand first.

[00:43:45] Andy Blechman: Interesting. I think that's a really interesting distinction to figure out what are the brands, cause I'm on an ingredients kick right now. Like I just have started the more I like learn about. I'm really trying to get way better at cooking

mainly

[00:43:58] Andy Blechman: because I'm a three year old that won't eat.

Um,

[00:44:00] Andy Blechman: Yeah, when you said the three year old likes your food, I'm like, I'm driving the Santa Cruz. But yeah like ingredients are so important. I think it's really interesting this idea of like finding the actual end product that you want and then backing into that is really fascinating to me.

It's the first time I've heard of that. And I think that's like a beautiful tip. There are people that can produce. We are not. Meal Prep businesses, even the largest are by no means at the scale of some of the largest production facilities in the country. And so I do think that it is possible, but I do, I definitely think you're probably going to have to look for it.

So that's a really interesting tactic. Super cool.

[00:44:38] Melanie Geist: You're going to have to look for it and you're going to have to be willing to spend more time on sourcing, like it's not going to be one. One purveyor that you're able to get everything out of you're gonna have to be willing to break it off.

And that's where I think it comes down to where you're putting you're willing to spend your time. Another back end application that we've chosen to use as Parsley, which I know Hava was on there. Your podcast series. So using an app that really managed the inventory and the software and the scaling really allowed us to support us in having a lot of different suppliers.

Because if you're making things really complicated in one way, okay, and then how can we streamline this in another and so Parsley's really been helpful and, they have a way of logging and each supplier and, you can rank them. I also think having multiple multiple sources for things is really valuable.

Yeah.

[00:45:30] Andy Blechman: And I think one thing we're about to launch on Friday is a community. For meal prep owners. And so maybe one thing we'll start as a wiki of like different producers where people are willing to share. And so people can start to based on your geography, here's the best source of ingredients.

And there can be some level of collaboration, especially at the national level.

cool. Couple more questions and then we'll let you go and meet some of your customers at pickup day. To the extent that you're comfortable, Hannah from Arizona would love to know, just get a sense of your size.

Like, how many subscribers or orders or clients do you currently have? You can either weekly or in your database, whatever, if you're comfortable sharing that

[00:46:06] Melanie Geist: Heard Hannah, I always want to know that too. Yeah, so we have a little over 650. I think we're at like, 660 or no, I'm sorry 460 clients right now and that's split up about 60.

3 to 1. So in terms of opt in members to all of our clients, which is our opt in. So we're still heavy on the opt outside. So any given week we're a seasonal business. So we're just coming out of our slow season when we drop off about typically about 20%. This summer was actually more like.

30 percent everybody was traveling. So that was a real challenge. But typically we're serving about 210 members. A week. Their cart size is generally about five products. We're looking for an order average above 120 for a really successful week. And that's where we've really played around with menu size and we can really identify successful menus and try to drill down on what people are looking for based on their cart values.

[00:47:05] Andy Blechman: That's interesting because that's actually the next question here is how do you decide your menu? How's it based on what customers want? Do you do a survey? I think you're a little more analytical than that, so maybe you can share for Michelle, what are you doing to set your menu and figure out what to put on the menu?

[00:47:21] Melanie Geist: Yeah. Again, this is something that has changed. So is constantly evolving. And I think it's really critical that you're willing to be flexible and change because I've seen, yeah, just our customers have changed. And so we've had to change the business to meet their needs. So again, Parsley. So Parsley has a menu application where you can build out the menu.

And then you can also put in your expected portion sales and they have a histories tab so you can use the histories tab to show you how much you sold last time. So we'll build a menu for the month. So we'll go in and say, this is what we want to do for October. And we go week by week build out the menu with our target sales.

for that week in mind and a menu that meets that target without our item number out out of the water so it's so many things to juggle to make it too difficult to execute in the kitchen but you also want to make it appealing to the customers and then I always look at the weather So depending on how hot it's going to be on that week or how cold, or, rainy really drives what is what people want to eat.

So taking into account what's happening right in your locality and what do you want to eat? What sounds good to you is a lot of what's going to sound good to them. So buildings, building out something that's enticing and like hitting all the different areas. Also one thing that we've noticed is, how much are people eating meals for lunch and how much are people eating meals for dinner?

And really you can see that in portion size. So we offer two different portion sizes on most of our items. And so if we see that an item is mostly selling single size portions, we know that's something people are wanting to take for lunch. If people, if we're selling more larger portions, we know that's more of a dinner menu item.

And so trying to balance that. that out in the menu really helps boost sales because, people, even if you put 10 extra menu items on your menu, people generally only have it in their head. I'm going to buy three lunches. I'm going to buy two dinners. So you've really got to, it, you got to push the categories in the right direction to, to capture value.

[00:49:28] Andy Blechman: Super cool. And I guess the last question we'll end with is what is your process like? How does it, what does a week look like in terms of prep ingredients, sourcing all the way through to delivery? How do you think about freshness and maintaining freshness and walk us through what that process looks like?

[00:49:44] Melanie Geist: Yeah so our week kind of starts on Thursday. We have people on the team working 7 days a week, but are really our week starts on Thursday. Our orders come in at noon. But before that, we're meeting with the leadership team and talking through that menu, talking through what happened the last week, but then what are we looking ahead towards?

What issues did we face on these menus? Before freshness, quality ingredients, any sourcing issues that we're having. If we have to sub things, we're looking at that. Then and then we also on Thursdays the previous week, when the previous week ended we do our advanced order for Thursday.

So some of the things like onions and garlic and ginger. And things for the soups that we're making that week. We order first. So those will come in on Thursday and we have a couple team members start sorting through that washing the produce, making sure it's stored properly to make sure that it stays fresh.

And then really, we try to cook in order of. How things will hold so we start with our soups, because we've seen that those hold for a week. No problem so we start with prepping those and then prepping things like our frittata that also You know hold well, and then we try to execute things at the last possible moment So prep first and then you know execute for freshness So again executing things that are fully cooked first, and then we finish with our salads so that those were that the produce was just cut like the day before people receive it.

And then we put up heating and serving instructions each week that make recommendations of how long to hold the product. And we really encourage people to eat those fresh items within a couple days, prioritize those, and then, hold your soups for later in the week or freeze them so that they stay fresh.

Fresh. And then yeah, choosing packaging that is gonna hold onto that freshness. At first we started with those compostable containers that are just paper. They don't make a seal. And it was nice because, it's more environmentally friendly than the plant plastic, but it doesn't hold your product.

Freshness. So having to match. And then we also use jars that we, yeah. We put a deposit or have our clients put a deposit on, and then they get that dollar back when they bring the jar back. Being able to put things in jars means that they hold and seal. Of course, it's more environmentally friendly and it helps create this community feeling that, we're in it together.

They're bringing things back clean. We're reusing them. And we we're all in it together.

[00:52:10] Andy Blechman: Very cool. I think that's a great place to start a stop. The jar the, there's a whole sustainability, I think vibe to your business, and I think that the ending on the jars is something that I really didn't want to get to.

So I'm really glad he brought it up. And I think that's a nice little data point around. You can create a little circularity within your business, which is becoming more and more not only important, but also something that consumers seem to love. So with that, Melanie, amazing. Thank you so much. This is awesome.

Filled with so much information. Really appreciate you sharing. And yeah, it's just been great to be a small part of your business. So thank you so much for everything that you do for us and for your community. And let's we'll talk soon.

[00:52:51] Melanie Geist: Thank you, Andy. And thank you to your team. This you're a vital part of our business.

So thanks for helping us grow.

[00:52:56] Andy Blechman: Of course. All right. Take care.

[00:52:57] Melanie Geist: Bye.