Introducing the Joy of Home-Cooked Meals, Honoring My Best Friend (My Mom)

Hi! 

Kelly here, cofounder of Homemade. I am so excited to introduce our blog series. 

Here, Pooja and I will be sharing more about our vision for Homemade and why we’re so thrilled to be building it. We really believe that this platform is going to transform how people eat (...and improve health outcomes, empower a stronger community, and create flexible new income for amazing cooks.) To start, I want to share a bit more about why this business means so much to me personally.

Hold on, because to get the full picture, we’ve got to go back about 25 years. To the mean-mugging toddler you see below, who is fueling during her YMCA soccer game with every child’s liquid gold, Capri Sun. You can see the same sugar coma-induced child enjoying her ice cream unashamedly. Don’t worry, this post isn’t going to be anti-sweets propaganda. Everything in moderation.

I grew up during a period in which nobody was really talking about what a “healthy” food was, in the real sense of the word. Everything had to be low-cal and take less than five minutes to prepare. Slimfast helped you lose weight, as did Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, Lean Cuisine, and a million other diet-centric brands. All seemed pretty healthy to me. I had no idea that I should care about what was actually in the food. 

At the same time, my mom was working full time as a teacher for elementary schoolers with special needs, and raising three kids of her own. And…she loathed cooking. It wasn’t restful, meditative or creative for her; it was just a chore. So naturally, as many moms would have done, she opted for the easiest stuff available that would keep us full and happy. We ate fast food, ordered takeout, or heated up frozen meals most nights. 

In retrospect, there really wasn’t an optimal solution for her. And in exchange for home-cooked meals, I probably got more time with her in other areas. That was the crux of it, right? It was time, or it was home cooked meals. You simply couldn’t have both as a busy working mom of three.

My mom was diagnosed with appendiceal cancer when she was 50 years old. She fought it fearlessly and gracefully, but she passed from the disease four years later. I know that we’ll never know why these things happen, but ever since I lost her, I have been completely obsessed with health, eating well, and being in-tune with my body. The two things that always make me feel strong and healthy are exercise and eating homemade food. 

For the past eight years, my status quo has been: staying healthy, advancing my career, spending time with friends and family, and always doing my best to honor my mom. She was my best friend, so her voice is constantly in my ear: being kind is the most important thing a person can be, assume well of others, and do good. 

Okay, stay with me. We’re fast forwarding to Harvard Business School now. 

During the second month of my first year here, I fortuitously sat next to a wonderful human being named Pooja Singhi in an info session for people interested in starting a business. We started talking about our interests (food, social impact), our values (treating people with kindness, honesty, integrity), and we were off to the races.

Pooja and I decided to start a business together that would make it easier for people to eat healthy, homemade foods. At first we thought that might be a CPG product that would make it easier for people to cook for themselves, so we did customer interviews with busy working moms in order to understand their pain points. We spoke to moms about how they feed themselves and their families on a daily basis, and we kept hearing the same thing: Moms did not have the time or energy to cook, but they wanted their families to be healthy. So they ended up either spending the time cooking, settling for a subpar meal delivery option that no one liked after two months, or feeling mom-guilt while ordering takeout. 

After all this time, all this innovation in the world, moms are still dealing with the very simple tradeoff my mom dealt with: It’s time, or it’s a home-cooked meal. So a lightbulb went off for me and Pooja. The easiest way to help busy working moms is to have someone else in the kitchen doing the cooking. 

Thus, Homemade was born. This business is taking meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning off of moms’ plates (pun intended). I am building this in honor of my mom, who had to make impossible tradeoffs. I am building it for my future self. And I am building it for all of the amazing, hardworking parents in the world who want a custom, delicious, healthy, convenient option that works for their family. 

It’s actually Homemade, just not by mom.