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Food like mom used to make

MissFresh, co-founded by alumnus Bernard Prevost, makes it easy to cook healthy meals at home
September 24, 2015
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By Philip Fine


Recent years have seen a decline in the number of people making their own meals. Many working folks either don’t have the time to cook, lack confidence in their skills or are short on recipe ideas.

Alumnus Bernard Prevost’s MissFresh delivers portioned-out ingredients to customers who can then cook their meals at home within 30 minutes. | Photo: Courtesy of MissFresh

Bernard Prevost, BComm (acct.) 07, GrDip (acct.) 08, wants to change that — he believes we still crave the kind of cooking we experienced from our mothers or grandmothers. “Most people want a home-cooked meal,” he says. “It’s ingrained in us.”

So Prevost, his sister Marie-Eve and childhood friend Ritter Huang recently founded MissFresh. The Montreal-based business delivers ingredients, recipes and instructions for nourishing, home-cooked meals.

People want to know what's in their food
Prevost says MissFresh not only saves people time and makes it easier to cook a good meal but allows clients to see the ingredients.

“People want to know what’s in their food,” he says. “You don’t get that with pre-cooked or frozen, or take-out from a restaurant.”

The ingredients are individually portioned and the printed recipes include professionally shot photos. Each dish — such as pork tenderloin and bok choy or citrusy herbed chicken thighs with sweet potato — can be made within 30 minutes.

The menus and prices — which range from $8.50 to $11.50 per serving — for a set of three or five meals for the week are available at missfresh.com. MissFresh’s meat is hormone-free, its eggs free range and its boxes recyclable, with future plans for reusable boxes.

A hit with investors
While the business was launched at the beginning of August, the concept has already caught fire with investors, who provided $1 million in financing, surpassing the team’s original goal of $800,000.

It was only last year that the Prevosts had fulfilling jobs in Sydney, Australia, Bernard as a regional CFO for data giant Acxiom and Marie-Eve as a digital operations executive at Seven West Media.

Bernard Prevost and his wife Emmanuelle Tardif, an engineer, had moved to Australia in 2012 to fulfill their dreams of working abroad. The couple had two sons while down under.

In 2014, after their second baby was born, Marie-Eve Prevost temporarily moved in with them. The family was subscribing to a meal-preparation service they really liked.

Marie-Eve, who is a great cook, told them they should stop the service; she would cook for them. But they had five meals that they had already reserved for that week, which meant Marie-Eve would experience what they had grown to love.

“She couldn’t believe her eyes,” Bernard Prevost says. She loved the service — and the two began to talk about bringing the concept to Montreal.

At MissFresh, Bernard became chief financial officer and Marie-Eve became CEO and the person behind the product development and marketing. They called their childhood friend, Huang, who had helped make the e-commerce search engine Azzimov a success. Huang agreed to become chief technology officer.

The trio plan to expand the business to Toronto by next year, helping more people eat at home.

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