Chef Box aims to deliver a heartwarming cooking and dining experience to your doorstep

Cooking at home brings joy to all.

There is nothing like home-cooked food. For some reason, meals that are prepared at home can easily rival the finest restaurants around – bonus points if they were cooked by a loved one.

Natalie Long, co-founder of Singapore-based meal delivery service Chef Box, particularly enjoys cooking with friends. In fact, she and her current co-founder Max Tiong are part of a group of friends who regularly meet up on weekends to replicate interesting recipes that they chanced upon. “We love the experience of cooking together, and food always seems to taste that much better when it’s home-cooked,” she explains.

However, the group constantly found themselves running into a huge problem in the form of never-ending work commitments:

As busy professionals ourselves, we understand how it is when we want to cook something but work kicks in, throwing everything out the window – there’d be no time to dig around for recipes to cook, much less to be hunting for ingredients. And when we do get to cook, we only use a portion of what we bought. So there’s always the problem of what to do with the remaining ingredients since we don’t have the time to cook everyday.

Needless to say, they’re not the only ones in Singapore who face this issue. A survey conducted by Robert Half in 2012 found that a whopping 98 percent of Singapore employees work overtime. To put it in Singlish, where got time to cook food?

Long and Tiong decided to do something about it. “We were talking about this one day, and realised that we can help solve this problem for Singaporeans like us. That’s how we came up with Chef Box,” Long recalls.

A DIY model

Meal delivery startups are all the rage around the world today. Many of them focus on providing maximum convenience by sending the entire meal to their customers, all cooked and ready to be consumed. Chef Box takes a different route, one that has been adopted by the US-based Blue Apron and Germany-based Hello Fresh, both of which were recently funded to the tune of US$50 million apiece – they send their customers the ingredients and a recipe instead.

The reason for this: they want to retain the cooking experience, and make it fun and easy to learn. “We don’t think of the Chef Box model as a better Foodpanda or McDelivery, since we provide a different offering,” Long says. “We primarily cater to those who are looking for healthier meals, and want to learn how to cook without the extra hassle.”

The duo also painstakingly ensure that the recipes are designed to promote a healthier diet. “The alternatives to cooking at home these days include eating out and food delivery, which are expensive and unhealthy depending on what you order. When we are busy, we start choosing unhealthy options more often than we should,” she explains.

The act of cooking places the decision-making process back into the hands of the customer, who can then choose to make a healthier choice – less oil and salt, hopefully. Long adds: “By making it a lot easier for people to choose home-cooked food over take-outs and fast food delivery, we hope to help Singaporeans eat better.”

Reducing wastage