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Mom’s Meals Opens Kitchen Here to Feed More Seniors
NORTH JACKSON, Ohio -- As almost 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day and the average lifespan grows longer, the list of companies that care for senior citizens grows longer as well.
One company that delivers meals to homebound seniors, Iowa-based Mom’s Meals, has opened its second kitchen in the Mahoning Valley. The president and co-owner of Mom's Meals, Rick Anderson, held a press event Tuesday to intoduce his company to the press.
“Seventy percent of our client base is east of the Mississippi [River], so we were looking at a geographical area we could put another kitchen in that would make sense,” Anderson says.
Anderson chose the old Heather Creek Foods plant on Commissioner Drive because the building meets U.S. Department of Agriculture standards and has the needed workforce.
Mom’s brought in 12 to 14 contractors with 60 construction workers to remodel the plant and ensure it was up for food production. The remodeling of the front offices and food preparation and storage areas took five months.
“We try to use fresh whenever possible. We make it fresh. We do a lot of it by hand,” Anderson said. All the fresh foods come from nearby distributors.
The plant consists of a prep area where raw foods are prepared for cooking, a kitchen where they are cooked, a cooling down area where that freshly cooked food is rapidly chilled, and more prep areas where cooked and chilled food are separated into containers then packaged to keep oxygen out and then labeled.
After it’s cooked, the temperature of the food is kept between 32 and 41 degrees. The diabetic and heart-friendly meals prepared with no preservatives are delivered next day in temperature-controlled containers and guaranteed for 18 days in the recipient’s refrigerator.
“By not freezing it and keeping it fresh when it’s delivered to you, you’ve got a product that’s just like you made it next door and brought it over,” Anderson says.
Home-cooked meal was the concept on which the family-owned company was based when Anderson and his wife started it in 1999.
The operation employs 55 in the plant and another 35 at a distribution plant along with route drivers who deliver to customers’ homes in Ohio.
“We’re slowly gearing up. We’ve been at this about four weeks and we’re running about 40,000 meals a week right now,” Anderson says. “We’ll ultimately get to about 200,000 to 250,000 meals a week.”
Mark Paskey, who leads the kitchen where raw foods are cut and prepared for cooking, cuts vegetables by hand. He said hundreds of pounds of vegetables are prepared every day.
Paskey, a law enforcement retiree who wanted work to keep busy, saw an ad for workers from Mom’s Meals and started in January.
With two kitchens and distribution plants, the original in Iowa and the new one in Ohio, Mom’s Meals delivers meals in more than 40 states through UPS Inc. and FedEx. Electronic temperature trackers were used to create a database that tells the company how many ice packs to include in the package to keep it below 41 degrees when it is shipped.
The Ohio kitchen, twice the size of the Iowa kitchen, handles all deliveries east of the Mississippi River. The company ships more than 10,000 coolers a week across the country.
Each cooler contains 10, 14 or 21 meals at $5.99 each and options for seniors eligible for Medicaid are available as well.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.