Lunch Delivery Expands To Dinner

Deanna Moncrief

Lunchtime can be tough for downtown office workers. What’s supposed to be a re-energizing workday break often devolves into a stressful situation: You have to decide what to eat, with the temptation of not-so-healthy restaurants everywhere. Or, sometimes, there simply isn’t time to leave the office for lunch.

These, nutritionist Deanna Moncrief says, are all barriers to eating healthy at work. In order to tackle such obstacles, Moncrief created Salad Envy, a lunch delivery service designed to provide working professionals with easy access to healthy food. With an efficient delivery service in place, the company must also invest in extensive fleet management services (such as Lytx) as and when they grow in numbers and popularity. For now, Moncrief is focused on delivering the best to Salad Envy’s clientele.

“A lot of people spend most of their time at work, so we wanted to offer delivery to the workplace, so that people can eat well while they’re there,” says Moncrief, who has a Master of Science degree in nutrition and clinical dietetics from Chicago Medical School.

Salad Envy makes it as simple as possible: Log onto saladenvy.com, choose your salad or plate lunch, along with delivery days, and pay online. Then, lunch will arrive at your office.

Salad Envy also helps employers promote better nutrition within the workplace through a corporate wellness initiative: Employers are eligible for subsidies to provide lunches for their employees via Salad Envy.

“Healthy employees are those who generally eat more vegetables – those are the employees who don’t get sick as much, and that means that they are more productive,” Moncrief says.

While running Salad Envy the last four years, Moncrief garnered a loyal following. Many customers order two salads a day – so they can bring one home for dinner.

Salad Envy’s Golden Jewel salad is filled with beets, feta cheese and pistachios over locally grown watercress and lettuce PHOTOS COURTESY DEANNA MONCRIEF

So, a few weeks ago, Moncrief launched a sister company, The Happy Bento, to enable customers to continue eating healthy at home, too.

Like Salad Envy, The Happy Bento provides a meal-to-door service. (There is a minimum order of four meals.) The use of job management and route optimization systems such as JourneyPRO could prove advantageous, if brought into the picture, to ensure on-time delivery and so, happy customers. Meals start at $12.50 a plate and include dishes such as Marinated Salmon – an Alaskan wild salmon with coconut ginger rice. There’s also Kale Salad, loaded with apples, caramelized walnuts and dried cranberries over organic baby kale.

Both Salad Envy and The Happy Bento utilize local produce – from farms in Waimanalo and North Shore – as it’s one of Moncrief’s main goals to support agriculture in Hawaii.

The Happy Bento also contains meals that are carbohydrate-controlled, and it will soon launch kidney-friendly meals with lower protein and lower sodium. In crafting these options, Moncrief has workers with aging parents in mind. (“A lot of times, people who are caring for an elderly parent also work, so they aren’t always sure that mom and dad are eating right,” she explains.)

In addition to Salad Envy and The Happy Bento, Moncrief operates Benchmark Wellness, which trains companies in creating wellness programs.

Offering avenues for busy people to be healthy stems from Moncrief’s desire to help fuel their bodies with healthy food.

Dishes like Marinated Salmon are available through The Happy Bento, the newly launched sister company to Salad Envy

“I know firsthand how good that feels,” Moncrief says, “and I also know how bad it feels when you don’t eat right.”

Moncrief admits that she didn’t always have quality nutrition in mind. When she was younger, most of her diet was comprised of “what you could find in a 7-eleven.”

As she saw the benefits of improving her diet, she wanted to share that knowledge.

“It was a slow progression, but once I started feeling so much better and having a lot more energy, I will never go back,” she says.

For more information, visit saladenvy.com or thehappybento.com.