MealPro 2024: Prepared Meals From All-Natural Ingredients
When MealPro says that it cooks your meals in a state-of-the-art facility, it’s not lying. Prior to our talk with founder and managing partner Andy Sartori, he gave us a virtual tour of the company’s Sacramento food plant. If you need a meal delivery service, and you live in the US or British Columbia, check out what MealPro has to offer.
Please tell us more about MealPro
MealPro is an online meal delivery service. We’re vertically integrated, meaning we built the technology and the product as well. Customers can use our website to determine if they want larger portion sizes, a low-carb diet, paleo meals, weight gain or weight loss meals, or low-sodium meals. They can get it down to a healthy and tasty meal plan that’ll keep them on track.
Who is the MealPro customer?
We cater to a range of customers. Our comfort food dishes like lasagna, marinara sauce, and beef are very popular with working professionals who want their meals delivered.
Our customers also include high-performance athletes who tend to order speed-scratch meals (meals that combine ready-made and fresh elements). For instance, chicken and brown rice: two ingredients make up one tasty meal and it’s as close to natural as you can get. It also holds amazing nutritional value: zero trans fat, 50-80g of protein, and 8oz of cooked lean protein.
Other customers include seniors who want low-sodium meals and people who can only have particular foods, like those recovering from heart surgery, for instance.
Offering affordable meals is important for MealPro. What options does a customer have for less than $10?
We have entry-level items, such as fried rice, food by the pound, and a basic à la carte menu. A basic meal would be a protein, a veggie, and a starch, and you can choose to customize it by adding more protein, taking away carbs, and so on.
MealPro is the most affordable food delivery service by the cooked-ounce. Our average price point is about 21oz of cooked food for less than $10.
What makes MealPro different from other food delivery services?
Our customers tend to be very loyal. We have a base that comes back time and time again, and it keeps our ovens running full-time. We don’t have to go out and advertise to replenish the churn. A lot of other food delivery companies have very high turnover rates. They cannot keep customers, so they must advertise and offer coupons to keep themselves busy.
How do you tackle the logistics issue of fresh food delivery?
We have two facilities: the Sacramento-based food plant and the storage facility. We can store all the packaging in the latter. What we do in terms of business continuity has a big packaging component. The packaging we use to get food from the kitchen to your door while keeping it fresh is very unique: we have a high-barrier sealing film, and we package this with dry ice, that keeps the food cold.
Also, we work directly with the source of food. In a traditional environment, a restaurant buys small quantities of food, so they go to a broker instead of directly to the source to get ingredients. The supply chain is a little bit shorter in our case, so there are fewer intermediary steps, and that allows us to keep the food fresh.