Put a lid on it
Entrepreneurs’ on-the-go meals are both attractive and nutritious
IT ALL BEGAN one morning in January 2013 when Irene Divaris’ busy daughter complained that there was a fridge full of food but no meals that were ready-to-go — an age-old problem that faces many households.
On the kitchen counter was a Mason jar, and Divaris decided to layer a lunch in it using several ingredients from the refrigerator. With a sense of whimsy, she snapped a photo of the meal in a jar and posted it on Facebook.
And that’s the moment, she says, Meal in a Jar was born. The Kitchener-based business offers busy families and young up-andcomers convenience food that is preportioned, healthy and fetching to the eye.
Driven by social media, hungry people in Waterloo Region started placing orders for a week’s worth of jars and picking them up from Divaris’ house on Sunday.
The day she opened her aptly named >>
>> Meal in a Jar Facebook page she received five orders totalling 25 jars; within a month, this ballooned into more than 100 jars.
“It was proof that there were plenty more people out there, other than my daughter, who were struggling to find healthy meal choices that fit into their on-the-go lifestyles,” Divaris says.
Fast-forward to today and Meal in a Jar has blossomed into a company assembling upwards of 1,000 jars weekly in a commercial catering kitchen.
The budding entrepreneur shares credit for this growth spurt with business partner Carson Kolberg, who had his own “aha moment” during a routine haircut.
At the time a fourth-year business student at Wilfrid Laurier University, Kolberg caught sight of one of Divaris’ jarred meals on his hairstylist’s work-stand.
“I was immediately attracted to this beautiful presentation of food,” Kolberg recalls.
He just happened to be searching for a food-related venture for an entrepre-
neurship project as part of the Laurier LaunchPad program. “My research showed that people were looking for higher quality lunch options for the workplace, particularly in areas where access to healthier choices was limited.” Intrigued by what he perceived to be a winning concept, Kolberg managed to wrangle Divaris’ phone number from the man with the scissors who had been a Meal in a Jar subscriber for a couple of weeks.
After an initial phone call, Divaris invited Kolberg to her house one Sunday to help prepare a batch of jarred meals. “The first thing I noticed was that Irene had a flair for presentation,” Kolberg says. He offered to infuse the startup with some of his marketing savvy and as quick as you can say apple-chicken salad, a new business partnership was formed over mounds of sliced carrots and quinoa.
While the duo say their venture has been mostly painless, any new food-related business is going to have its “what have we gotten into” moments for the uninitiated.
“The food industry is very regulated in Canada, and since we came into this without a background in food business, there was a big learning curve,” Kolberg says.
For starters, as demand for their product ramped up, they needed to move out of Divaris’ home kitchen into a commercial space. Aspects of food safety, ingredient sourcing and the nuances of preparing large amounts of food were just some of the hurdles they needed to leap.
Even something seemingly as innocuous as labelling the jars became a notable undertaking. Kolberg looks back not so fondly on the day that a 220-page manual on food labelling landed on his desk. “Suddenly my weekend was spoken for.”
Divaris and Kolberg are quick to praise the Waterloo Region food industry for its knowledge-sharing that made their learning process much less taxing. “Everywhere we turned, people were so great in helping any way they could,” says Divaris.
They also trumpet the local universities for being an open book when it came to insights on business planning, sustainability, nutrition and packaging.
After some epic days in the kitchen, where yoga sessions were employed to calm frazzled nerves, Divaris and Kolberg have handed over the cooking and assembly of the jars to a trained food production crew that includes head cook John Steimann.
While now focusing their efforts on marketing and sales, Divaris and Kolberg are still ever-present in the kitchen space they rent from Bingemans on weekends >>
>> to keep an eye on quality control as the food is being cooked and assembled.
“We refuse to cut any corners that might make production easier but in the end would sacrifice quality,” Divaris says matter-of-factly. As an example, Meal in a Jar undertakes the more laborious task of using dried beans because they offer superior taste and texture to their canned counterparts.
Currently, the company offers eight hot or cold food jar combinations including No-Butter Chicken, Mulligatawny Stew and Rainbow Salad, which is made with an inspiring melange of quinoa, black turtle beans, dried cranberries and a kaleidoscope of crisp veggies.
All are gluten-free and guaranteed fresh for seven days. As part of their waste-free business model (hence the reusable glass jar), leftover ingredients from production are donated to the House of Friendship’s men’s hostel.
The food is stuffed into 500-ml jars with each proving roughly 300 to 400 calories, 30 grams of protein and made-from-scratch dressings. Sodium is capped at 500 milligrams.
“The perception from most people when they open up a jar for the first time is that there is a larger volume of food than they had expected,” says Kolberg. Divaris has always been fond of stuffing jars with nice big chunks of food so you feel more satisfied.
The price for the jars with their flashy red lids is $9 to $10, which includes tax and a jar deposit.
“The jars were initially designed for lunches, but people are now using them for dinners if they have worked all day and are too tired to cook when they get home,” says Divaris.
“A major goal we have is to help provide people with at least one complete meal a day from unprocessed food,” adds Kolberg.
They have even set their sights on the possibility of creating breakfast jars as a healthy solution to frenzied mornings.
While always scheming up new recipe ideas, developing them is so much more than just stuffing food into a jar.
“There is a great deal of criteria that has to be met before a recipe can be executed,” says Divaris. This includes building a jar and letting it sit for several days to see how it behaves and tastes, determining the nutritional breakdown and coming up with a game plan on how to make hundreds of them in a time-efficient manner.
“A new recipe can easily be a monthlong process,” Divaris says. She adds that their customers have a very active voice in what they want. “It’s almost like a family is following us.”
Beyond their solid base of subscribers, the burgeoning roster of retail outlets that now carry Meal in a Jar includes Healthy Foods and More, Vincenzo’s, Balzac’s Coffee, Fiddleheads, RIM Park and the Athletic Club in Waterloo. Divaris has actively sought out health clubs as a place where people who are hunting for time-sensitive healthy meals congregate.
Event catering has also become a stronghold for the company, be it corporate meetings, Tour de Hans or an Ontario Volleyball Association tournament held at RIM Park.
Meal in a Jar is even working its way down the 401, recently planting jars in Whole Foods Market outlets in Mississauga, Oakville and Yorkville.
Soon you may even see the entrepreneurs in their signature green T-shirts on CBC’s Dragon’s Den. Meal in a Jar is one of the 150 businesses spanning the nation that have been granted the opportunity to pitch their business plan to the Den’s well-heeled for the upcoming season that runs from October to March.
While we will have to wait to see if they have scored a significant influx of capital, it’s clear that it’s time to pop the lid on eating better than ever.
For more information on Meal in a Jar, check its website: www.mealinajar.ca.