Let’s face it, it’s not easy to make a gourmet meal using all fresh, local ingredients. It’s hard enough to find time to procure all the pieces of your dinner puzzle.
So why not let Local Baskit do the work for you? The Concord-based meal kit startup is putting together some creative weekly meal options for you to choose from. They provide the ingredients and the recipe. All you have to do is the cooking.
Owner Beth Richards was in your shoes at one time. She was a busy mom with two young children. She traveled for work, and didn’t have a lot of time to put together the kind of meals she felt her family needed. So she turned to some of the national meal kit options, but after trying a few, it wasn’t for her.
“They said it was fresh and local, but I knew it was shipped from far away,” Richards said.
So she started a folder on her computer with ideas for her own meal kit company. It was time to switch gears on a professional level and she figured why not take the meal kit model and include food from right here in New Hampshire.
“The meal kit industry and concept have been around for about five years now,” Richards said. “This is a way people are going to cook and shop.”
After researching the idea, and going over every possible scenario for starting a business, Richards decided there was no time like the present.
“It’s the way people are choosing to eat, so why not give it in a local way?” she said.
A few months back, she launched Local Baskit, and so far things have been moving in the right direction. Local Baskit has about 100 subscribers, which translates to about 100 meals going out the door each week.
“This is a very niche market,” Richards said. “But niche is doing well.”
So here’s how it works. Go to the website and select one of the three meal kit options. There’s the artisan baskit, which provides eight to nine recipe choices each week and includes top tier meat, seafood and vegetarian selections, and is ideal for foodies.
The fresh baskit offers five to six recipes with mid-range selections for meat, seafood, and vegetarian. And there’s also the simple baskit, which has four or five weekly recipes and all the great produce options, but no proteins.
“There’s many different options to choose from,” Richards said.
Once you’ve decided on your meal kit style, then you choose how many people you want to feed (two or four) and how many meals you want (two, three or four).
“It’s great for a single person because there’s not a lot of waste,” she said.
The great thing is that your order can change from week to week and you can even skip a week without having to pay. There’s even an option to deactivate your account and pick it up at a later time.
After choosing your meals for the week, you can choose to pick it up at a designated location, like the Winter Farmers’ Market at Cole Gardens, or have it delivered for a $4 fee. And delivery days are Wednesday through Saturday, with packaging beginning on Tuesday each week.
And like we said before, if you’ve got a busy week or going on vacation, you can put your subscription on hold. You just have to do it by Sunday at 10 p.m.
The recipes were created by Richards or adapted from ones she had come across in the past. Each meal comes with all the instructions and ingredients, you just need to have the basics – salt, pepper, oil, milk and eggs.
“They’re always adapting to what there is locally,” Richards said.
What makes Local Baskit different from the national meal kit companies is that the goal is to have each ingredient in every meal come from New Hampshire. Richards works with places like the Vegetable Ranch in Warner and Moulton Farm in Meredith for produce, Brookford Farm in Canterbury for cheeses and Miles Smith Farm (Loudon) for meats. And she keeps adding more farms to the list in order to provide her customers with the freshest and largest variety for their meals.
“The desire to have local food is huge,” she said.
Just think, the produce could be picked Tuesday morning and you could be using it in your meal the very next day – and you didn’t have to do any of the work.
The plan is to open a more traditional store front in the future, but those details are still being worked out.
For more info, pricing or to sign up, visit localbaskit.com – or catch Richards at a winter market.
