Eating healthy is essential for living and feeling our best, but it’s also a lifestyle that requires a lot of time and energy. Planning menus, buying ingredients, and cooking take much-needed time out of our days. With everything else going on with jobs, kids, school and sports, it’s often tempting to just go through the drive through of our local fast food restaurants. It’s quick and easy, but doesn’t give us the ideal nutrition and fuel our bodies need.
Thankfully, there’s an easier solution to feed yourself and your family in a way you can feel good about. Origin Meals delivers nutritious and delicious food right to your door. Founded in 2013, it originally catered mainly to gyms for members who wanted to follow a paleo diet.
“We had offered home delivery services prior to COVID, but when COVID shut all the gyms down, we pivoted directly to homes,” says company founder and president, Tyler Carlson. “We ultimately found that our service was more convenient for our clients when it was brought directly to their houses.” Today, Origin delivers to subscribers all across the major metro areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and is adding new zip codes all the time.
Ordering meals on its website could not be easier, and the menus cater to special dietary needs such as vegetarianism and those with gluten and other allergies. “Everything we do is gluten free and we don't use any refined sugars or industrially processed or hydrogenated oils,” he says. There are also no fake colors or flavors, or artificial preservatives or chemicals.
There's a variety of meal options so you can pick and choose, or you can enable the system to auto assign meals according to your dietary preferences. “It can be as simple as just subscribing - setting it up and forgetting about it,” says Tyler. “But, it can also be as tailored as you want it to be.” Subscribers can order as few as 3 meals a week or as many as 15.
Whatever your choices, every meal is made fresh with the highest quality ingredients such as 100% grass-fed beef, free range turkeys, antibiotic free chickens and wild caught salmon. Sauces and marinades are also made from scratch.
“Nothing is ever frozen,” he says. “Meals are produced in a local kitchen and are delivered by us directly to our customers’ doors. Being local allows us to have a fresher, higher quality product. Our head chef, Jeff, is in charge of making and preparing our menus.”
Adds William, the company’s marketing manager, “Jeff likes to stick with a worldly palate that includes Asian and Mediterranean dishes. Something that I think Origin has had from the beginning was just a good sense of variety, which is important in order to avoid too much repetition.”
Menus constantly change so you’ll never run out of new and tempting meals. The way the program works, explains Tyler, is that they design a six week menu that will rotate through twice. and then they design a new menu. “So every 12 weeks our menu really changes, which also helps us keep our foods in season.”
Origin will also deliver to companies. “We can bring pre-made salad bowls and grain bowls right to an office setting,” he says.
A large component of Origin Meals, says William, is giving back time to people. “We find that's something that our customers are really grateful for, and for our clients with allergens, they are so grateful that they have the peace of mind that they can just open up a meal and know that they're not going to have to face any allergens without searching labels.”
For other people, they just love the fact that they don’t have to go grocery shopping and cook dinner after work in order to maintain a healthier lifestyle. “We definitely get reports of people who have lost significant amounts of weight from eating our meals for lunch and dinner,” says William. “It really helps with their calorie counting and following macros, if that's what they choose.”
In addition to keeping people’s bodies healthy, Origin Meals is focused on keeping the planet healthy by using sustainable practices. It does this primarily through its recyclable packaging and its delivering mechanism.
“Instead of shipping everything in a corrugated box that someone has to throw away every week, we use a reusable cooler program,” says Tyler. “Then, when people are done, they put the coolers back outside and they're picked up when the next delivery is made.” Origin’s kitchen, thanks to its preorder system, also produces 50% less waste than a traditional grocery store.
To look through their menus and see for yourself what can be on your table in the next few days, go to https://www.originmeals.com/.
