By Donna Cornelius
Even for those with the best of intentions, eating healthy isn’t always easy.
The two women who own Nourish want to make it that way.
Tiffany Vickers Davis and Mary Drennen started their food delivery company last November. Both are busy moms – and both are into nutritious eats.
“Mary eats more ‘clean’ – vegetables, healthy grains,” Davis said. “I’m more paleo.” The paleo diet focuses on whole, unprocessed foods.
Nourish offers meals from both eating styles at its websites, www.nourishpurepaleo.com and www.nourish-foods.com. Customers can visit the sites, see photos of the food and select the meals they want and the delivery date.
Couriers will deliver orders in almost all of the Over the Mountain area.
“We also ship all over the United States at no charge,” Davis said. “We’ve shipped to California, New York, New Jersey and Chicago.”
Drennen grew up in Birmingham. She went to Washington and Lee University and then to New York’s French Culinary Institute, now the International Culinary Institute.
“I had always loved cooking and had cooked in a couple of restaurants,” she said. “My first boss was Mike Dragon at Azalea when I was 17. The second summer of college, I worked at Daniel George. I was the only female and the youngest person there. But all the guys were so nice to me.”
Drennen said her mother discovered the French Culinary Institute during a trip to New York.
“She toured it and fell in love with it. My mom’s a doer,” Drennen said, laughing. “A lot of culinary schools are four years, like college. This one had a six-month program, which I liked. I just wanted to get things going.”
Davis, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, native, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor’s degree in communications.
“I worked in public relations in Los Angeles and New York, and in New York I remembered that I liked to cook,” she said.
Davis attended culinary school at Johnson & Wales University in Charleston, South Carolina. She worked at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill and at Magnolia’s Uptown Down South in Charleston.
The two women met and became friends when both were working in Cooking Light magazine’s test kitchen in Birmingham. Davis started working there in 2001, and Drennen came on board in 2004.
“I sat in front of Mary, and we talked over our cubicles,” Davis said.
In 2007, the pair started a catering company called In Good Taste.
“We mostly did private parties in homes,” Davis said. “That was our favorite thing – small, high-end dinner parties.”
Drennen said the idea for a new business came about through another venture.
“We had been doing a private label meal plan for Iron Tribe Fitness,” she said “We saw a need in the community for high-quality, healthy meals, so we launched Nourish.”
About 95 percent of their customers live in the Over the Mountain area, Davis said.
“A lot are moms with children to shuffle about,” Davis said. “Others are singles trying to eat healthy. It can be hard to buy healthy food in small quantities. Most people don’t want to buy 16 ounces of kale – and eat on it and eat on it.”
Customer favorites include Low Country shrimp on cauliflower “grits,” scrambled or poached eggs on sweet potato hash, and a spinach salad with grilled chicken, berries and almonds.
“One of my favorite dishes is our zucchini noodles with pork Bolognese,” Davis said. “I’d call off my vegetarianism for that anytime.”
Some food delivery companies provide the ingredients; customers have to make the meals themselves. Nourish’s food comes almost ready to eat in containers that can safely go from the fridge to the microwave or oven. Right now, each meal is individually packaged – but that’s about to change.
“We’re about to start offering a family meal plan to feed a family of four,” Drennen said.
Nourish operates in an expansive space on the top floor of a 29th Street South building in Birmingham’s Lakeview neighborhood.
“It has plenty of room and still gives us room to grow,” Drennen said.
Nourish likely will need that extra space as the company continues to expand. In addition to adding larger-sized meals, Davis and Drennen are partnering with Take Them a Meal. The website registers users who need help with meals due to sickness or other situations. Then others can sign up to provide food.
“You can go to the website and send our food to somebody instead of making and delivering it yourself,” Drennen said.
The women said they usually arrive at work at 7:30 or 8 a.m. and can leave in time to take their children to after-school activities. That schedule is a plus for their staff, too, they said.
Drennen, who lives in Mountain Brook, is married to Bob Jacobus.
“I inherited three fantastic stepchildren who go to Vestavia schools,” she said.
She also has a 6-year-old daughter, Betsy, a first-grader at Mountain Brook Elementary. The family expanded May 29 with the birth of her twin sons, Robert and Felix.
Davis and her 3-year-old son, Garrett, live in Homewood. He’s a student at Creative Montessori School in Homewood.
“He is neither clean-eating or paleo,” Davis said. “He likes carbs and cheese.”
