Castine woman sprouts meal kit business focusing on local freshness
A freshly-sprouted meal kit service is making dinner easy, healthy, and local.
BLUE HILL, Maine (WABI) - Every evening, it can be an uphill battle as one asks themselves the age-old question: What should I have for dinner?
In Blue Hill, a Castine woman is making the answer simple.
“Farm & Fish is a meal kit service, and we focus on sourcing as many of our ingredients as possible from the great state of Maine,” describes founder and CEO Kate Pilotte. “Every week we source from 15 to 20 difference Maine companies, so some are farms producing meats and vegetables, others are making food in Maine like tortillas or mustard or more shelf stable products that you might see in the grocery store.”
Pilotte has been running the service as a one-woman show since opening Farm & Fish in June. The inspiration behind sprouting the fresh company was Pilotte wanting a more local and sustainable alternative to larger national meal kits.
“I’ve been a big fan of the meal kit service and the meal kit experience for a long time. I enjoy cooking, but I never had time for the sourcing and the planning, or at least to do it well. So, I’ve always appreciated that experience in that product, but my two kind of wishes around it was, I never knew where my food was coming from, and it was just a lot of plastic packaging, and so, I started Farm and Fish as a way to connect Maine home cooks with the producers in the state,” explains Pilotte.
To combat these two issues, Farm & Fresh source and provide the list of all farms and Maine-based makers providing the ingredients as well as utilizing compostable containers whenever possible. It is Pilotte’s hope to utilize reusable containers that consumers can give back when Maine law allows it.
Pilotte explains the importance of consumers knowing where their food is coming from as, “In the interest of supporting your local farms and your local produce, you just learn more about what’s going on around you which I think is helpful and healthy for any community.”
Currently, Farm & Fish serves the Blue Hill Peninsula area, but they are hoping to dish out on dinner tables all over Maine.
“We have 10 different meals to pick from every week, so they can expect variety, they can expect quality, they can expect a lot of their dollars to stay in the state of Maine, and they can expect to cook with a recipe that walks them through the steps with delicious food, and then to sit down with a meal that they created themselves but with a little help upfront,” says Pilotte.
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