Mindful Chef

Mindful Chef: making healthy eating easy… and delicious – Exited in 2020

The growing importance of healthy eating to consumers cannot be overstated. Yet our busy lives make it harder than ever to devote time and effort to sourcing then cooking balanced and nutritious meals. When it comes to food, convenience is king.

It’s a problem that Rob Grieg-Gran, Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper understood – then set out to solve with Mindful Chef. The trio, childhood friends from school, had one goal: to make healthy eating easy. In doing so, they have together created the UK’s favourite healthy recipe box brand.

Since its launch in 2015, Mindful Chef has delivered nearly two million meals to UK consumers. All meals are nutritionally balanced, gluten and dairy free and contain no refined carbohydrates or sugars. All ingredients are fresh, high quality and sustainably sourced from local farmers where possible. Farmison, the UK’s ‘Butcher of the Year’, supplies beef, free-range poultry comes from Traditional Norfolk Poultry and James Knight of Mayfair provides the company (and Buckingham Palace) with fresh fish. Each week, 16 different recipes are available for customers to select from.

For the growing number of UK consumers seeking out a healthier lifestyle, Mindful Chef not only helps them discover and cook quick and tasty recipes conveniently and quickly but it also helps them to reduce food wastage by providing only the food they need to eat. Customers can also return their packaging free of charge.

The brand is mindful both in name and nature. Through every meal purchased, Mindful Chef’s charity, One Feeds 2, donates a meal to a child in poverty. To date the company has provided more than a million meals for children in need. In 2018, Mindful Chef was officially certified as a B-Corp status company, joining a global movement of organisations that balance purpose and profit and use business as a force for good.

The brand’s highly differentiated health focused positioning has won Mindful Chef admirers in many quarters – especially in the world of professional sport. It is official Nutrition Partner to the English Institute of Sport and athletes Victoria Pendleton CBE, Sir Andy Murray and Tom Daley are among its many supporters.

In 2019, we invested £6m into the business to enable it to continue its rapid growth and expand its customer base across the UK. At the time of investment, the brand had annualised sales of £10m and employed 27 people at its HQ in Wandsworth, London.

With the growth of the recipe box market set to double over the next decade, Mindful Chef is well on track to help consumers lead healthier lives and bring benefits to wider society too.