Joshua Riazi is a trained chef who has worked at a number of top restaurants in the country. He now owns Ripe Food and Events, a full-service catering and events company in Rhode Island. Here, he tells us the ways his company is helping people eat healthier food at home.
One new thing that we are getting into here at Ripe Food and Events is meals that we can prepare here, but that people can eat at home. It is a way to diversify, and to give people the chance to let us cook for them even when they aren’t necessarily hiring us to cater a wedding or other big event.
The latest project we have in the works is a product we are developing called Ready Made Meals. The concept is pretty simple. We will basically prep all of the food for a particular meal and then deliver it to people’s homes, where they can reheat it and eat it when they want.
With cooking, the biggest reason why so many people tend to get annoyed with the process is because so much prep work is involved. And even after the cooking portion is done, suddenly there is so much of a mess to clean up. That in itself is what takes the majority of the time when people are cooking a big meal. The cooking itself usually doesn’t take long. But it is all the chopping, and the prepping, and getting all the ingredients for the recipe ready that takes the most time when preparing a nice meal.
So what we have done with our new Ready Made Meals product is we have simplified all that. We will do all the prep work for you, and then we will put the meal in a nice little package that you can throw into your oven and finish off yourself. And within a matter of minutes, you have a beautiful, gourmet meal that tastes great, looks fantastic, and makes your home smell delightful, too.
In a way, the Ready Made Meals product will be more like a restaurant menu that you can cook in your own home, since the offerings that we have are not exhaustive. All dishes that we will offer with the product are seasonal, dishes that can be created using local, oftentimes organic, products.
We haven’t come out with the product yet because we are waiting to get more information from some local farmers that we work with, and we are waiting for them to get some of their seasonal produce and ingredients back in stock. Once those things are available again, we plan on setting the new products up on online where people in our local area can order them and have them delivered.
Once it is ready to go, clients can go onto our Ripe Food and Events website and order which dishes they would like to get. The selection will be a little more limited, I guess you could say, than what you would find at a grocery store or other shop. But that is because our meals are centered around what is fresh right then.
Once the clients order the products off the website, they can either come into our location and pick them up or we can deliver them — most likely we will be delivering them to people’s houses.
So people can order however many meals they want for the week. Like, for example, let’s say someone wanted one meal for each day of the week, or maybe one dinner each day and one lunch each day for one week. So we would cook all of that up and deliver it to their house.
And not everything that we would be creating will have to be cooked in the oven, per se. We also plan on offering people salads and other things that don’t have to be reheated.
I think this is going to be an exciting product, and something that is really going to help out a lot of people who want to cook but just don’t feel like they have the time or the skill.
