School lunches can be a major source of stress for busy parents. Packing lunches is time-consuming, and preparing food that can survive in a room-temperature backpack for the better half of a day can make all the difference as to whether or not a child will actually end up eating it.
Pak’d, a local startup part of the Techstars Chicago class of 2016, is looking to take that worry off parents’ plates.
Born out of co-founder Kara O’Dempsey’s need for a simpler way to prepare lunch for her three kids, Pak’d delivers pre-made, customizable school lunches directly to families’ homes. Starting with a number of pre-built lunch options, parents can choose the boxes they like as starting points and swap out side dishes and remove ingredients as needed.
Co-founder Rebecca Sholiton said this customizability is key to making the product a viable alternative to traditional packed lunches, since many children will simply go without lunch if they don't like what they're given.
Orders can be put in on a week-by-week basis or planned up to a month in advance, with meals delivered weekly via FedEx on ice. The operational efficiency afforded by this model means that Pak’d can theoretically deliver to the entire Midwest from a single facility.
“Down the line, a year or two years from now, we’ll be able to reach 95 percent of the country from four or five facilities,” said Co-founder Nathan Cooper.
Sholiton said she and O’Dempsey had been toying around with a number of different business ideas centered around making healthy kids’ food more convenient, including a healthy drive-through restaurant with kids’ and parents’ menus.
“But then we started really thinking about where the pain points that aren’t being addressed are, and consistently we heard about this idea of lunch,” said Sholiton. “Lunch is your fuel for the day for a lot of people, and that’s where a lot of people are going to packaged foods. So we said this is an opportunity to bring real food back into the mix.”
Together, the three co-founders started thinking about how the service would work, and put together a simple website where customers could sign up for a trial version.
Cooper said the scope of the business opportunity hadn't dawned on him until his sister posted a link to the trial on a Facebook group for local parents last July.
“We were hoping to wake up to 15 or 20 emails, and that next morning we woke up to 300 emails,” he said.
Since then, the team has spent a lot of time on market research about what parents and children are looking for in a school lunch and which recipes can stay fresh throughout the day. They’ve also been working with a design firm to develop the packaging that helps meals survive shipping, storage and spending the day in a warm backpack.
Having recently closed an $830,000 angel round, the company entered the Techstars Chicago program this summer and have been working with a developer to build out the ordering platform.
Though the service officially launches on August 29 — just in time for the start of the school year — curious customers can already sign up for weekly deliveries as part of the trial program.
Images via Pak'd.
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