Want the Freshest Home-Cooked Meals, Delivered? Try Mosaic, for a Change

Sometimes you want a fresh home-cooked meal without lifting a finger. Mosaic is the closest thing to that, though you do have to unwrap it and stick it into the microwave. But for the same effort as a not-so-nutritious frozen pizza, you could be eating delicious dishes made with farm-fresh vegetables, spiced to perfection, and gorgeously displayed on your plate.

Butternut Squash Risotto, Miso Tempeh Bowl, and all sorts of delicious, nutritious meals made in small batches from farm-fresh ingredients are ready to be delivered to you, at less than $9 a meal, so long as you live within a day's drive of the New York area. It's a new delivery service called Mosaic and it is the freshest food delivery we have ever tasted because it's local.

How do we know this? Because we tried out Mosaic and then had to hop on a call with founders Matt Davis and Sam McIntire to ask: How do you do it? How do you get these greens and squash and grains to taste like they were never frozen in the first place? One thing is that they limit shipping to within a day of the prep kitchens, which are in Millbrook, New York, and another is they developed every recipe themselves in their Brooklyn home, before handing it over to a chef from a catering company to take the reigns. Actually it was in Matt's home, which he shares with his neurologist wife. The bad news was he took over half their apartment when working with Sam, prepping Mosaic's earliest meals. The good news is, she ate delicious meals after every long hospital shift. Matt had worked as Senior Director of Operations at Blue Apron for three years and decided to make the meals for his customers, so they wouldn't have to do as much prepping and cooking when they got home.

Now the meals are made in Millbrook, NY, by catering chefs who spent many of their days creating catered dinners for weddings and graduations, birthdays and anniversary parties. When those caterers are not busy with events like weddings (as in nowadays), they are currently busy making your meals from Mosaic. And one of the best parts is that despite the "high end' taste, the meals clock in at under $9 per serving.

"It's like small-batch cooking," Matt explains. "These meals are created based on what the farmers nearby are growing, and we like to think of the kitchens as catering kitchens,  not industrial kitchens," so it's essentially food catered for you by Matt and Sam, and delivered. Matt said his inspiration was to get food as good as Sweet Green, but frozen and made sure that by freezing and unfreezing each dish, they could maintain the fresh-taste integrity of it once it gets to the customer's home. they scaled up slowly. then Coronavirus hit and their business went through the roof. Now they are keeping up with increased demand, but keeping quality at the forefront of their offerings, along with healthy plant-based bowls.

Mosaic specializes in delivering to customers as far as a day's drive will take them: New York and the area around it, Philly, and as far south as Washington D.C. Matt told The New York Times he spent the first months delivering meals himself until the business started to scale and he had to outsource the cheffing and the schlepping. For the quality, you can't find a meal as good for $8.99. Mosaic offers gluten-free options, and is cautious about all their sourcing, choosing local farms that grow within an easy drive of the kitchens.

For people outside the area of delivery, put in your zip code when you sign up and stay tuned for expansion plans to come. But knowing Matt and Sam as the perfectionists with their hands on the wheel, they won't grow unless and until the infrastructure is in place to keep the meals as fresh, as "catered" as possible. That's Mosaic's purpose and these guys are men of integrity.

So the next time you "just don't feel like it" when it comes time to make dinner, be sure you have a Mosaic stack of meals in your freezer. Yank one out, pop it in the micro, and grab the bottle of wine. Dinner, done.

Hey Beet readers. Matt and Sam are offering you $30 off with the code BEET at checkout. You get $15 off your first order and another $15 off your second order, for a total of $30.