MANCHESTER, NH — Here’s the deal at All Real Meal. Real food, lovingly and carefully prepared with real service and real compassion for the community. And real, real busy.
Sales have doubled to over 800 meals a week for the already-booming Elm Street-based home-delivery and curbside pickup meal service since the outset of COVID-19. And why not? The online menu with pages of food glam – including just about any dietary restriction – is the farm-to-table experience you’re craving. Non-GMO, organic, locally and naturally grown ingredients, touts the website.
I’ll take the Beef Barbacoa, $12.95; Mojo Chicken (for the next day), $12.95, and the Caramel Apple Cheesecase, $6.95, thank you very much! (FYI: there’s 27 more options to drool over at www.allrealmeal.com and owners Sonia Farris and Kasia Lojko love to change it up!)
Simply order, pay online, and your freshly made meal will be personally delivered cold – never frozen – with heating instructions to over 50 towns in New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts every Tuesday, with limited deliveries on Fridays.
Partners/chefs/friends Lojko and Farris started the award-winning company seven years ago with more than food on their minds. “We’re in the business of community service,” says Farris as Lojko busily attends to supply orders, “As women and mothers living in the Manchester area, we have always had a heightened awareness of food need and food insecurity.”
Preparing their first meal in a tiny commercial kitchen they rented from a restaurateur in Manchester in 2013, they wanted to give back to the community they called home. In those early years, All Real Meal partnered with numerous Manchester nonprofits such as the New Hampshire Food Bank’s Meal for Meal program, Families in Transition, and Waypoint’s SleepOut event to aid homeless youth in NH.
Farris continues, “The running joke at All Real Meal at the time was that we made more food than money. We just kept giving it away because it filled us with such satisfaction and purpose.”
Her voice is earthy and expressive; an undeniable mix of gregarious and gracious. Neither she nor Lojko brought professional cooking training to the job. Despite their diverse cultural backgrounds, Farris is of Puerto Rican descent, and Lojko was born and raised in Poland, both share a deep passion not only for cooking but for the universal celebration of communal time at the table.
It was in this spirit that the two socially-conscious entrepreneurs created All Real Meal’s “suspended” meal program. Think buying coffee for the stranger behind you but way bigger. And more nourishing. For just $10 you can order a “suspended” meal that will go into a reserved account for someone in need who has privately come to the attention of the business staff. Perhaps it’s a senior citizen whose limited income and mobility has deprived them of the joy and nutrition of a homecooked meal. Or a single mother struggling to make ends meet. Whatever the case, All Real Meal’s long-established philanthropic ethos has given them a leg up on dishing out love in the time of COVID-19.
“We take a lot of pride in knowing our customers and their needs,” says Farris, “so when we realized many of our elderly clients were worried about the toilet paper shortage, we contracted with our distributor early on to get a bunch of toilet paper in bulk and add it to our menu.” And they didn’t stop there. Customers can order bread – gluten-free and non – fresh farm eggs, and, get this, even masks.
It’s come at a price. Not to their customers, to themselves. Real Deal Meal’s staff didn’t take a day off for the first six weeks of the virus crisis. Farris and Lojko totally revamped prep and delivery protocol to maintain a contaminant-free environment in which to work. Social distancing practices at the job means smaller crews working odd hours and shifts to fulfill the ever-increasing demand for their comfort food, because that’s what it really is, comfort in a troubled time.
Click here for some fast All Real Meal FAQs
All Real Meal is located at 87 Elm St., Manchester, NH, 603-782-3014 Mon.- Fri. 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Got foodie news? Carolyn R. Choate can be reached at crchoate13@gmail.com
