Kia ora,

I’m Simone and I founded Grub’s Up in 2017.  I was the sole cook in my house at the time and I was over it. Either I wasted hours trying to find new inspiring recipes, or I cooked the same 5 meals over and over again. I visited the supermarket 3 times a week and spent a fortune buying ingredients I’ll never use again.

So, I tried a meal kit delivery service, thinking this would be the answer to all my problems. And it was great….for the first 2 weeks. Then I realised it was super expensive, I didn’t actually like all the meals, there was heaps of food and packaging waste, and it just wasn’t flexible enough for real life – like when netball runs late and I can’t be bothered to cook, or when Nana and Grandad come over for tea and I need food for 2 extra adults.

There had to be a better way. A service where I could plan meals based on my family’s preferences and get a shopping list so I only had to shop once. And so, Grub’s Up was born.

Before I built the website though, I surveyed 2000 Kiwi’s and I found out pretty quickly I was not the only one feeling the pain. Getting dinner on the table is hard. Approximately 750,000 NZ households wake up every day not knowing what’s for dinner that night and 75% of us spend more than 15 minutes planning dinner each day. That’s nearly 2 hours a week just planning!

According to our survey respondents, there are 4 reasons Kiwi’s find it hard to to get a healthy dinner on the table every night.

• 33% lack recipe inspiration
• 21% don’t have enough time to cook healthy dinners
• 17% have complex dietary requirements – from picky kids, to diabetes and celiac disease
• 16% do not have enough money to eat well

Since then we have built a digital meal planning platform designed to make dinner easy. We’ve created hundreds of recipes, signed up lots of customers, and cooked heaps of dinners!

At the beginning of 2023 we decided to make our service free. We were charging customers $6 a week but in the face of growing interest rates and ever-increasing food prices, we thought, let’s make it free and help some Kiwi’s out there.

So, thanks for joining us, it’s great to have you with us. I hope you find our meal plans useful.

Kia ora,