meal prep services in the region, ranging
from the home-based and dubiously
legal to nationally distributed brands.
Like the national contenders, these
local companies ship meals or ingre-
dients to customers’ homes, by sub-
scription or a la carte, and promote
themselves as healthy, efficient alter-
natives to cooking or dining out. What
sets them apart is their scale: Unlike the
VC darlings Blue Apron and Munchery,
Sacramento’s meal prep companies rely
on their own earnings. Entrepreneurs
in this sector claim that meal prep can
be an efficient alternative to traditional
food business, with less overhead and a
more predictable cash flow — as long as
people are willing to stay subscribed.
The largest local meal prepper is Tri-
fecta Nutrition, launched by siblings Greg
and Elizabeth Connolly in 2015. Trifecta
has partnerships with big names, includ-
ing the UFC, CrossFit, the PGA Tour and
Team USA, and more than 100,000 people
around the country have subscribed to
the meal service, Greg Connolly says.
He saw an uptick of demand of about 25
percent over the first quarter after the
coronavirus reached the United States.
“The thing that’s served us very well,
actually, is that we haven’t gone out and
raised a ton of money, like a lot of our
competitors that are dead along the
way,” says Elizabeth Connolly. “They
could spend a lot of money and not make
money, and it was OK, because they have
millions of dollars in the bank. … We
haven’t done that, so we had to be scrappy
and make sure the costs make sense.”
Trifecta also has a different mar-
keting strategy than its national com-
petitors. While Blue Apron marketed
so widely that its customer-acquisition
cost dwarfed its per-customer revenue,
Trifecta aligned itself early on with a
narrow niche: athletes, fitness influenc-
ers and the people who admire them.
The marketing team sent free meals to
CrossFit stars with small but devoted
fan bases in the hopes that they would
post about them on social media.
Kimberley Bernhardt is doing most
deliveries herself to cut costs during
the coronavirus crisis.
After gaining the support of local
angel investor Mark Haney, Trifecta
started landing partnerships with UFC
wrestlers, including Sacramento’s Urijah
Faber. Though Trifecta still sends meals
to influencers and athletes, most of the
company’s complimentary subscriptions
now go to its 350 employees (50 in the
Sacramento office, 300 at its Los Angeles
manufacturing and packing facility).
2016 by Andy Sartori, a UC Santa Cruz
alum with a penchant for bodybuilding.
But MealPro isn’t just for bodybuild-
ers. “We also have the old lady that doesn’t
have her license and needs nutrition
delivered to her door,” Sartori says. “We
have somebody who’s on a low-sodi-
um diet and can’t have a cheap meal,
unlike you and I that can just walk into
a Chipotle and buy whatever.” These
“We’re gaining more customers than we’re
losing in any given week, which is good. The
kitchen I have right now could probably easily
double what we’re doing.”
Kimberley Bernhardt, owner, Kimberley’s Kitchen
Another fitness-focused, social
media-savvy meal prep startup will arrive
in Sacramento by the end of 2020. Meal-
Pro, based in San Jose, is in the process
of moving operations to a lower-rent in-
dustrial space on Auburn Boulevard. For
now, the company is establishing its local
presence at a temporary storefront in Old
Town Roseville. MealPro was founded in
are market shares that are not served by
traditional food businesses, he says.
“With delivering meals, you can reach
so many more people,” adds Sartori, who
managed a Panda Express and owned
a food truck before launching his meal
prep delivery service. “In a restaurant,
you might just have people that drive
1 or 2 miles to visit your shop.” Meal-
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