Writer / Pete Walkey Photographer / Keeley Miller
Fresh Artistry is a service that delivers locally designed recipes and fresh pre-portioned ingredients to your home. They help you make chef-grade meals for your family without the hassle.
Founder Tom Blessing (IU grad and former investment banker in New York City) grew frustrated with his lifestyle. For three years, he worked long hours and lived off restaurant food. His third year, he gained 20 pounds, felt terrible and needed to make some changes. After wishing a service existed that would help him cook fresh meals quickly and easily at home, he quit his job, moved back to the motherland and started Fresh Artistry.
He designed Fresh Artistry for the busy household who wants an easy way to eat exceptional, fresh, nutritious meals around the table at home. He fully believes the idea that meals are best shared with each other, so he built a service that helps busy people do that.
The way it works is you set up your account online. Then you just sit back and watch spectacular recipes show up on your doorstep. They deliver once per week with three recipes per box.
Each week, there is a menu of seven new recipes to choose from. You can select three recipes per week or be surprised and have them selected for you. You can login and customize each delivery or put it on auto-pilot. There’s a Sunday midnight deadline to customize your menu for the week.
They studied a group of Indiana families to test this out. On average, the families ate at home five times per week, and the two-person households ate at home four times per week. They figure two times per week are either leftovers, pizza or “get dinner on your own.” They want to help with the remaining three times per week when you want to eat together.
Your delivery arrives in an insulated box with refrigerated gel packs via a delivery service. If you’re not home when it arrives, no problem. They include enough refrigerant to last overnight on your porch without issue.
Tom values the freshness and ingredient control of cooking but is extremely sensitive to convenience. They target recipes made in 30 minutes start to finish because their customers want to look like a master chef to their family without time-consuming prep on the front end. Many of their fresh vegetables come pre-chopped and spices pre-blended, and recipes are simplified and tested.
The ingredients are locally grown when possible. They source Indiana-grown beef and poultry through Moody’s Butcher Shop. No hormones, preservatives or antibiotics are ever added. Their produce is frequently organic, local when possible and always fresh. It’s restaurant grade.
The cost for their two-serving plan is $19.99 per meal ($59.97 per box of three recipes). Their family plan is $29.99 per meal ($89.97 per box of three recipes) and feeds two adults and two to three children. They chose this pricing because it’s nestled right between the price customers might pay going out to eat (higher) and the price they pay getting their food from the grocery and doing everything themselves.
They add value by delivering ingredients, organizing all the ingredients and helping customers experience the expertise of a master chef. They targeted $5-$6 per serving. Their research revealed that a family of five might spend $150-$200 per week on groceries, so they wanted to fit into that budget. While there are cheaper ways to feed families, there isn’t an easier way to get fresh, chef-grade meals on the table at home.
Joining Tom on Fresh Artistry’s management team is Brian Carriger and Chef Nick Carter. Nick has been the chef for Wolfgang Puck Catering and Black Swan Brewpub and currently is an Adjunct Professor at Ivy Tech Culinary School. Visit freshartistry.com to learn more.
