Healthy meals on wheels
View(s):Supporting the health conscious by delivering healthy meals to their doorstep, the crew behind ‘Healthy Living’ say rice was key to not making their meals feel like diet food.
It was rice that Shehan Selvanayagam discovered, was the trick to making a diet not feel like a diet. However, after eating 50 different kinds of buth packets, he knew Sri Lankans were eating too much of it. The serving of rice overwhelmed the amount of vegetables in an average kade lunch. Together with vegetables chosen for their cheaper price (and not their nutritional value) and curries thick with oil or coconut milk, the rice created a heavy calorie load – an estimated 1400 a day. That was 1400 calories out of the recommended 2000 – 2,500 daily adult caloric intake and clearly far too many. Shehan cared about this because he and his wife were on a personal quest to lose some weight and get fitter. Regular trips to the gym weren’t enough, they needed to figure out their diet too.
Shehan
“As me and my wife have been trying to lose weight with limited success, though there are plenty of options available in Sri Lanka in order to exercise such as gyms and parks, there are limited options when it comes to eating healthy other than cooking the meals yourself at home,” Shehan tells the Mirror Magazine.
“We looked at buying meals from restaurants, but most of the healthy meals were western themed meals which for one was quite expensive to have on a regular basis, but it was not catering to the Sri Lankan palate.” They realized this was probably a conundrum shared by many. Their solution? Start their own business.
Shehan says their menu draws on the abundance of beautiful fruits and vegetables grown in the country itself. “We wanted to break the myth that healthy food should not contain rice,” he adds. To help them get the balance of calories just right, ‘Healthy Living’ recruited a nutritionist. They came to the conclusion that for a Sri Lankan to stay on a diet, there was one thing they couldn’t do without. “We realised the biggest failure of healthy meals is that it was not taking into account the love Sri Lankans have for rice as we tend to eat it 3 times a day,” says Shehan.
With that taken care of, the team focused on whittling down the 1400 calories to just 600. They packed in 2:1 portions of vegetables to rice and chose those vegetables with care. Out went the starchy vegetables like potatoes and yams and even protein intake was managed – if fish or chicken was being served, soya wouldn’t also be added on. “Our battle was a tough one since we were trying to make our food tasty while remaining healthy at the same time,” says Shehan. “Even though we have been in operation for a few months, we spent some time doing trial runs to ensure that our food was tasty while remaining healthy.” They decided to change the menu every day, planning them a week in advance.
Today, their meals are cooked in a home that has been transformed into a professional kitchen. A staff of four cook everything and then delivery people take over, ferrying the meals all over Colombo so that people have their lunch by 1pm. Orders must be given by 8am every day, but most people have placed standing ones – for the week or the month. They knew they had to price it well (currently a packet costs Rs.250) to win big numbers.
With a background in e-commerce, a degree in Business Management, Masters in IT and CIM (UK) qualifications Shehan knew it made sense to rely on social media sites for marketing. “In my current field I have realised the power of social media which gives businesses an opportunity to launch businesses with a relatively small marketing budget instead of investing in expensive forms of traditional marketing.”
Response has been largely favourable but right now ‘Healthy Living’ is only serving lunch on weekdays. Eventually they hope to expand take on weekends and not just lunch but dinner as well. They’re dreaming of a larger business that supports the health conscious in many ways: “We are hoping to move a round the clock service where people can order all their meals from us and we are hoping to leverage on our product offering into other complementary products required for a healthy lifestyle.”
Find them online at http://www.facebook.com/HealthyLiving.lk
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