MealPro Update: Acquired A $3M Facility And Started Sponsoring Pro Athletes
This is a follow up story for MealPro. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 5 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Andy Sartori, and I am the founder of MealPro, a direct to consumer meal delivery service. At MealPro, we offer multiple dietary themes, such as meal plans for athletes, for people on a weight loss journey, for those who have to deal with a medical condition, and more. We call this “eat with purpose”.
Within each theme, we allow customizations to make sure that each meal plan is as unique as the person it is intended for – as a result, no two meals coming out of our facility are the same, because they are designed to match different tastes and purposes. We even created the option of fully custom meals, where you can create your very own meal plan leveraging a broad range of ingredients, and no constraints!
We are an online healthy food delivery company making America healthier one meal at a time. Our meals are chef crafted following science-backed nutrition principles for different diet types. Our online menus feature a variety of themed dishes grouped by nutrition goal (e.g. bodybuilding, keto, diabetic). Your orders are expertly packed for maximum freshness and delivered to you, ready to eat when you are.
Today, we operate out of our own 18,209 SF facility.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Since our last story, we have been committed to bringing fresh, local, and delicious meals into your homes along with all our customers across the country.
To enable our business model, we can not rely on a co-packer, like many of our competitors do since our process is so innovative and quality is so strict. To deliver on our promise to our customers MealPro needed to set up a proprietary kitchen, where we have full control of processes, staff, costs, and quality.
To do this, we purchased our facility with a state-of-the-art commercial kitchen. The building is a ~19,000 sqft multi-tenant space on 1.7 acres in the Sacramento metropolitan area.
We then fitted out the space with advanced technology and expanded our trusted staff to 15 members. We financed this $3M+ investment with an SBA loan co-managed by Wells Fargo. No equity partners have been necessary, as our financials support debt servicing on their own. MealPro occupies the majority of the building but rents out the remaining units in the space through Sartori Holdings LLC.
Our increased profile allowed us to be selected by world-class athletes for their dietary needs to support their excruciating training routines. We are proud sponsors of pro tennis player Jenson Brooksby and Greenbay Packer tight end Josiah Deguara and have been engaged by many others.
In these cases, we are typically contacted by their coach and on-staff dietician, as part of a short list of providers, and further screened in terms of quality and capability to ensure we meet the toughest standards. We have learned a lot from the professional athletes we support and we have applied our unique experience to a new line of fitness meals, for those of us who are avid athletes or just want to stay at the top of their fitness.
In addition to fitness meals we have also built a line of medical meals working with the world’s most renowned doctors and top universities including Idaho State University to build a clinically designed meal plan to reduce inflammation. :
Our precision-diet capabilities have attracted a lot of interest from academic and clinical entities engaged in nutrition-based clinical research on conditions ranging from inflammatory diseases to schizophrenia and renal failure. While many of these projects are covered by NDA agreements, we can elaborate on a project we supported with Idaho State University, on certain urologic conditions. It was a crossover trial aiming to establish to what extent a special diet can benefit patients exhibiting persistent inflammatory symptoms in the urologic tract. MealPro worked closely with scientists and academic dietitians to finalize the appropriate meal plan, source the appropriate ingredients, and support trial pilot and volume delivery.
Also, in this case, we leveraged the unique learnings from this advanced deployment to develop various dietary offerings for the general public. As an example, we have now a special medical meal diet for each stage of advanced renal failure - stage 3, pre-dialysis, and dialysis - highly differentiated to help mitigate the condition and to facilitate remission where applicable. They are becoming very popular with nephrologists and renal patients alike.
This is the anti-inflammatory meal plan we developed for the AID-IC Study.
Our Rd designed medical meal plans are created and approved by our dietitians, and doctors so you know you're getting the best nutrition possible. Sure - you could just hire a dietitian to tell you what to eat and a chef to prepare it, but that could get costly. We've done that for you so you get nutritious, home-cooked meals delivered to your door. You will find that these minimal effort medical meal plans provide you with maximum nutrition and better quality of life. For example, our new renal meal menu is nephrologist designed while our low sodium meal menu is cardiologist designed to help fight hypertension and reduce blood pressure.
Having a great product your customers love enables you to thrive in a crowded space even during a bear market.
In addition to working on meal development above we have further streamlined the farm-to-fork supply chain by investing in a fleet of refrigerated trucks that enables us to purvey ingredients from farmers. Sourcing from the growers allows us to eliminate middleman markups and allows us to give you fresher ingredients at lower prices.
In summary, since our last article, we have focused on creating healthy dishes our customers can’t live without!
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The challenge is to be the first in the industry to react to emerging needs and trends. For example, in my business, an emerging need brought forward by the pandemic is what I call “meals for mom”. Think of all those seniors (we are an aging society), still active enough to live in their residence, who have health problems and are concerned about the risks of going shopping. They are a new demographic, they need our services. Reaching this new demographic posed a challenge - but also an opportunity.
Being the first to create a strong offering for this demographic is a challenge and an opportunity at the same time.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
You don’t need investor money if you have a product customers can’t live without. Having a great product your customers love enables you to thrive in a crowded space even during a bear market. I started the company with very little working capital and always only generated revenue from our customers (a novel idea in the startup community where investor money seems to be the go-to) but this has been the driving force behind our bootstrapped, organic growth.
When we hit a problem we could not just throw cash at it — but we had to think outside the box to find a solution that did not require an outlay of money. Frequently the solution was improving the product (adding zero calorie spices to create different flavor profiles), improving customer service, and improving the UI on the website — all elements that have a low cost but high impact on our customers.
Overall, being low on cash forced us to have a better relationship with our customers to keep them coming back. We were profitable almost from month one and investing in our meals has been our ethos. We are truly a food company before we are a marketing company or a pr company! Our relationship with our customers is truly our #1 priority!
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
- We have launched a food incubator to help fellow food and beverage entrepreneurs find their footing and launch their products.
- Expand menu (add a plethora of vegan and veggie options) and add more ingredient variety to the meal plans we already have.
- We will open more facilities across the United States to provide faster service to more people.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
- Shoe Dog, a memoir by the founder of Nike, Phil Knight.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Have passion: If you are an entrepreneur, or if you want to become one, you are probably overworked and stressed out like me. What will give you the grit to go forward is enjoying what you do. Make no compromise on that — if you cannot have fun in your daily job, it will be much more difficult to succeed.
Develop your network: I am in close contact with another prepared meal entrepreneur, who has been in business for many years. We are not necessarily competitors, because we address different demographics, and we have gotten to know each other pretty well over the last couple of years. For me, it is very beneficial to compare notes with him, for example when I am looking for a new supplier or I feel a vendor is ripping me off. I feel this informal collaboration is a win-win and is developing into a true friendship.
Be data driven: Many founders and CEOs have strong opinions and rely on what they have seen work in the past, understandably so. As a result, they tend to have pre-conceived ideas to guide their decision making process. In a new business, similar as it may be to their previous one, this can be a trap. Demographics may be marginally different, a market response may be delayed, the supply chain may have unexpected behavior, and the bottom line may hit all sorts of unexpected issues. The overarching principle is to be always data driven in your decision making, not gut-driven.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Currently, we are experiencing growth on the product side of the business and have lots of openings in operations. Openings in finance, marketing, and other departments also come up. You can view the full list on our careers page here: mealpro.net/careers
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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