Mindful Chef

Idea

Introduction

Mindful Chef (mindfulchef.com) is a 1 year old recipe box company.

We focus on the healthy and premium end of the recipe box market and ship all the ingredients that you need to make 2-5 evening meals - all with fresh organic produce and no refined carbs (no pasta, no white rice, no bread).

We pride ourselves on our innovative uses of vegetables in evening meals that are both gluten-free and dairy-free. We ship nationwide, and cater for 1 person, 2 person and 4 person boxes. To our knowledge we also offer the UK's first and only vegan recipe box, alongside our meat and fish options.

► INVESTMENT REWARDS:

£200 - 25% discount for your first month (worth up to £120)

£500 - 25% discount for your first month (worth up to £120)
+ A blue Mindful Chef team jacket

£1000 - 25% discount for your first two months (worth up to £240)
+ A blue Mindful Chef team jacket

£5000 - 25% discount for your first three months (worth up to £360)
+ A blue Mindful Chef team jacket
+ An invite to our investment closing party giving you a chance to meet the team!

Intended impact

It takes time to plan for healthy meals, it is hard to source fresh products and there is often a lot of wastage. We solve that by delivering all the good-for-you ingredients that you need to create a delicious healthy evening meal for your family together with a recipe card. This saves our customers hours of time and importantly allows them to stick to a healthy routine.

We very much see our service as a "start of the week" product. As such, we deliver across the country on a Monday and on a Sunday evening within London. This allows our customers to enjoy healthy evening meals at the start of the week, before the distractions of a busy life take them elsewhere later in the week.

We like to think of a Mindful Chef delivery as the healthy heart of our customers' week and as our retention statistics demonstrate, we quickly become part of our customers' lifestyle. After a few weeks of eating our meals, customers report feeling an improvement in their health, and this boosts our retention enormously.

We have designed a product that the health and fitness industry can endorse - national gym chains, boutique fitness studios and a network of health and wellness professionals help us reach our (largely female) target market.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We raised our first external money in December of last year and have since accelerated to a weekly revenue run rate of over £20,000*.

We have now sold over 75k recipes to thousands of happy customers across the UK.

We are the UK's #1 recipe box company as voted by our customers on Trustpilot (9.5/10) and we would encourage you to read the reviews.

We have recently been nominated for Startup of the Year by the High Potential Business Awards, the only company in our category to be nominated within their first year of trading.

*source: Unaudited management accounts.

Monetisation strategy

Each week we ship all the ingredients that our customers need to make 2, 3, 4 or 5 evening meals. We ship 1, 2 and 4 person boxes catering for single diners as well as families. After ingredients, packaging, labor and delivery we currently achieve about a 25% gross margin* (dependent on box type).

We make money by retaining customers for many weeks after we have been paid back for our Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Our average Payback Period is around 5.8 weeks, whereas our average active customer has made over 10 purchases (a number that is increasing as we get older). We take 60% of customers through to week 3, and a third of all customers are making a purchase in Month 6 after joining our service.

*source: Unaudited management accounts.

Use of proceeds

► Marketing, Tech and Team:

We plan to spend approximately £600k on marketing in the next 12 months. This will be aided by the addition of a Digital Marketing Associate to our team, along with an in-house Videographer. We will spend an additional £150k on technology, improving UX further and investing in a mobile app.