Building on a shared desire to foster connection through food and community space, the café and food subscription service Nourished Folks is partnering with Wilson’s Grocery & Meat to provide a new pickup location for its subscription meals.
Riah Durick
Chef and owner Riah Durick launched Nourished Folks in 2019 as a meal prep service, opening a brick-and-mortar café in Greyline Station the following year. While the business offers a rotating sit-down lunch menu at the northside café on Fridays, its primary focus is a weekly subscription service offering healthy and satisfying pre-packaged meals for individuals and families who are looking for healthy nourishment while navigating the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Durick describes her vegetable-forward menus as “globally inspired and made from scratch,” with items that tend to focus on rice bowls, salads, soups/stews, and sandwiches. Recent meals on the café menu included a rice bowl with yellow rice, onion, red pepper, zucchini, and carrots; a kale Caesar salad with hemp hearts and buckwheat; and a green curry soup with rice noodles.
“We simply follow the rules of cooking from scratch,” she said, adding that she avoids using the word healthy, as she feels the term has largely been co-opted by the diet and fitness industry to promote shame-based eating practices. “Our food ends up naturally feeling good because it is made that way, and we think the body likes to eat it.”
The new partnership with Wilson’s, a neighborhood market on Cramer Avenue in the Kenwick neighborhood recently renovated and reopened by owners Matt and Jill Bastin, offers a more convenient location for clients who live in the Kenwick, Chevy Chase, and downtown areas.
“We want our subscription food to be more accessible to as many great folks in town as possible,” Durick said. “We partner with good friends [to provide] a grassroots location in Southland, and wanted to have a similar community partner approach in Kenwick.”
With a neighborly and convenient atmosphere, she felt the new iteration of Wilson’s would be a perfect fit as a partner, an inkling that was confirmed during a conversation with the Bastins that tapped into their shared interest in exploring outside-the-box opportunities to serve their communities as small business owners.
Chef and owner Riah Durick has expanded her meal-prep business, Nourished Folks, to include prepared meals ready for pickup by subscribers at Wilson’s Grocery & Meat on Cramer Avenue.
The partnership will allow many of Nourished Folks’ clients a closer place to pick up their subscriptions. “Plus they can grab some other great things that they need in the store while they’re there,” Durick said.
Matt Bastin said the new partnership is a great fit for his business and clientele. Wilson’s offers a variety of other locally prepared take-home meals, such as pizzas and lasagnas.
“We’re about providing items of established quality and convenience, and Nourished meals take a lot of pressure off of people who want to eat well and support small businesses,” he said.
While large chain grocery stores aren’t likely to offer meal pickups from local food purveyors, as an independent neighborhood grocery, Wilson’s is able to be more flexible, creative, and supportive of other small business owners, he said.
“We can help everyone involved with almost no risk, and it’s the kind of thing that folks have hopefully come to expect from us.”
Having more pickup sites is one step on the journey toward moving into other markets, Durick said. But so far, sticking to slow and calculated growth has worked well.
“Before that happens, we’d like to immerse Lexington in great-tasting food that makes their lives easier, more fulfilled, and be great neighbors in the meantime,” she said. “Finding and partnering with other folks like Wilson’s who make our city rich and wonderful is how we’d love to take this next step in growing so that we can eventually branch out into other markets.”