Markeshia Ricks Photo
Lloyd at a demo at Elm City Market.
The next time you’re standing in the frozen food aisle and reaching for dinner, you might find a plant-based option, thanks to Zoë Lloyd.
She promises cooking it will be quicker and less expensive than any meal kit you get delivered to your house. It also will be just as tasty without the fuss.
Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Zoni Foods, a start-up trying to make its way into frozen food sections and onto your plate. She started the company with Nilofer Ahmed while the two were making their way through the Yale School of Management.
Lloyd cooks up the zesty peanut noodles with peanut sauce and black bean fritters.
If you’ve been to Edge of the Woods or the Elm City Market recently, you might have seen her demonstrating two of the meal kits that you can pick up at either of the stores as well as at Thyme & Season in Hamden.
She said the idea came out of the rise in home delivery meal kits like Blue Apron that encourage people to get back cooking by providing a box full of fresh ingredients delivered to your door. That means no trip to the store to assemble all the ingredients.
“There are a lot of young professionals who want to cook for themselves,” she said. “But sometimes you get busy and things like vegetables will go bad before you can cook them, which I always felt pretty guilty about.”
A young taste tester gives the coconut curry noodles a go at Elm City Market.
And the mess. These fresh kits often involve multi-step cooking processes that can leave your kitchen destroyed, Lloyd said. People simply don’t have time for that.
Elm City Market employee takes a taste.
She and Ahmed sought to take the meal kit concept but simplify it even further. And to do that they had to enter the frozen food section, a place notorious for sometimes suspect ingredients such as lots of sodium, portions that aren’t filling, and food that isn’t always appetizing, she said.
So they developed an all plant-based meal kit that includes a starch such as noodles, a nut-based sauce, and a plant-based protein that can feed a single adult for just $5.99 with no added ingredients in about 10 minutes. The idea came in December and production began in May, Lloyd said.
Zoni Foods is based in New Haven, though co-founder Ahmed lives in Boston and the meal kits are processed a the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center in Greenfield. Lloyd said she and Ahmed tried to find a processing center in Connecticut that worked with small start-ups like theirs that could meet their cost and quality requirements but had no luck.
It helped to be connected to the alumni and well-known food entrepreneurs through Yale’s School of Management, from which Lloyd and Ahmed graduated in May. Lloyd also received a Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Fellowship, an eight-week program that provides a $15,000 stipend; mentors; legal, accounting, and marketing help; connects fellows with venture capitalists; and opportunities for fellows to pitch their businesses.
“The vision is really to make plant-based eating more accessible,” she said. “We’re really targeting the so-called ‘flexitarian’ who wants to eat less meat and dairy but doesn’t want to spend a lot of time cooking.”
The other vision is to get Zoni Foods meal kits into mainstream grocery stores like Whole Foods, Stop & Shop and Wegman’s.
“We want to scale up and be in larger grocery store chains,” she said.