Two Alabama chefs-turned-entrepreneurs are revolutionizing the way families eat

It’s 8 p.m. on a Tuesday evening and it’s been one of those days — the kind where you didn’t realize until just now when your pre-teen daughter yelled “I’m hungry!” that no one in the family has eaten dinner and you have no plan.

Nights like this usually end with the whole family either eating PB&Js or making another run out for fast food. And if we’re honest with ourselves, nights like this are more the norm than the exception in busy households, and they unfortunately come at the expense of our families’ health. On the flip side, meal planning, grocery shopping, prepping and cooking often come at the expense of our own sanity.

Imagine, though, if you could get fully-cooked, hand-crafted, healthy, affordable meals delivered weekly to your door. So all you’d have to do is open the refrigerator, grab the meals and pop them in the microwave or oven and have dinner look like this:

{REMINDER}: family meals are now available!! || Convenient, healthy, and affordable for hectic summer schedules! pic.twitter.com/mMnBAoS3b7

— Nourish (@nourish_foods) June 1, 2016

And then breakfast the next morning could look like this:

Oh my… This breakfast… || Perfect grab 'n' go option when rushing out the door on a crazy Monday morning??? pic.twitter.com/JG9cUWgB5d

— Nourish (@nourish_foods) June 27, 2016

And lunch that afternoon could look like this:

{FRESH} BBQ glazed salmon and roasted veggies! // Awesome, HEALTHY summer meal! pic.twitter.com/nbKoI86Vf2

— Nourish (@nourish_foods) May 18, 2016

That’s the vision Alabamians Mary Drennen and Tiffany Davis had several years ago, and today their company Nourish Foods is revolutionizing the way families all over America eat.

Chefs-turned-entrepreneurs

Mary Drennen and Tiffany Davis are passionate about food. As Style Blueprint explained in a 2014 profile, “Mary attended the French Culinary Institute, now known as the International Culinary Institute, in New York City, while Tiffany gained her culinary expertise at Johnson & Wales University in Charleston. Both of them landed in the test kitchen of Cooking Light magazine and have been lighting a fire ever since.”

In 2007 the two friends started a catering business together on the side.

“We were typically taking on high-end dinner parties and events in people’s homes,” Drennen recalls. “We would just cook for a handful of people, but it got us engaged in client relations and we learned about how to deal with food vendors and set pricing — all of the basics of working in a small food business.”

Several years later Drennen received a phone call that would forever change the trajectory of their business.

Forrest Walden, the CEO of Birmingham-based Iron Tribe Fitness, one of the fastest growing fitness franchises in the country, was looking for someone who could help him build an in-house food program for his member athletes. Drennen and Davis came in and produced Iron Tribe’s food program locally and it was a huge hit.

“That opened our eyes to direct-to-customer convenient meals,” says Drennen.

Before long, with Iron Tribe expanding quickly, they were shipping meals to gyms in roughly 15 cities all over the country.

“During that time we had a lot of people contact us about providing healthy meals for their family, even though they weren’t members of Iron Tribe,” says Drennen. “That’s when we realized there was a real market out there. That’s where Nourish was born. It’s a clean, healthy meal service for individuals and families.”

The business

At one point Iron Tribe Fitness accounted for 99 percent of Nourish’s business. Iron Tribe encourages its athletes to stick to the Paleo diet, and Nourish filled that void. Today Iron Tribe is about 5 percent of the company’s business, and they have significantly broadened their food options, and as a result, their clientele.

Here’s how it works:

Nourish customers log in to NourishMeals.com, choose the meals they’d like — or a subscription plan — and the meals start showing up at their door.

“We are in the high-volume business, but we are still all about making every meal feel special,” said Davis. “We spend a ton of time working on that. We work very hard on the food. We love cooking for our clients — it’s what we’re passionate about. But we are also working very hard on creating the infrastructure to scale our business without sacrificing the integrity of the actual food. That has been a rewarding challenge and we are getting to that place very quickly.”

In a town where talented chefs like Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings have turned their passion for food into highly profitable business ventures, Drennen and Davis are hoping to be the Magic City’s next culinary success story.

(Video below: The Nourish Foods founders tell their story)