Amy Jensen: Resourceful Meal Planning for the Busy Cook

While careers in the food industry often entail long hours of cooking and clean-up, sometimes a business opportunity comes from wanting to spend less time in the kitchen. Such was the case for Amy Jensen. Her motivation was based on the desire to feed her growing family healthy meals that fit into their busy day-to-day life. In an effort to find a solution, Amy created a meal planning strategy that reduced both cooking time and food waste. Her business, Eat Real With Me, is an example of how the pursuit of a personal passion can set one down an unexpected career path.

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Name: Amy Jensen
Job Title: Founder
Company: Eat Real With Me

Amy's Career Path:
I wouldn’t say I decided to pursue a career in food, as much as it just happened, and was a natural expression of who I am and the women who shaped me. My grandmother’s first job, after immigrating to Florida from Croatia, was as an elementary school cafeteria cook. From day one, she insisted on cooking from scratch, and quickly began to not only feed the students, but the teachers and principal as well. She refused to throw away good quality leftover food so she would save the unused pasta from one day to turn it into a creamy pasta salad with fresh dill the next day, which was the crowd favorite. Baka, as I call her, is the most resourceful person I’ve met.

My mom is an exceptional self-taught cook, who treats cooking as an artist would a painting. She starts with the basics, then adds layers of ingredients and spices until she’s happy with the result. From her, I learned that cooking is a creative process and that quality ingredients matter. Now that we live in the same city, “You gotta come over and try this,” phone calls are very common, as are gifts of fresh celery and whatever other random produce we find on sale to give each other as inspiration for the next meal. Clearly, we speak the love language of food.

Eat Real With Me is a healthy meal planning service that focuses on the resourceful use of time and ingredients. Each week’s plan cooks up stacks of meals that start with a base of batch-cooked protein and veggies. The leftovers are used in additional unique meals, with little food waste. I like to pull out whatever I have, get a vision for the meal, then get to work (and it looks just as messy as it sounds). But after having multiple kids, I found the need to add some serious strategy to this artistic process. I sought to answer the question of, “How can the modern person cook healthy in a way that works into their busy day-to-day life?” In an effort find a solution, I started to batch cook proteins and veggies and then get artsy with the leftovers. This method significantly reduced the time it takes to get something good on the table. I committed to cooking this way for a year, writing down what I put in things (for the very first time in my life) and photographing the results. I asked a group of friends if they would like to cook the meals with me, and with their positive feedback I started to offer the meal plans on a larger scale. The work of creating something good and good for you, and helping others do the same in a way that makes best use of our resources is really what propelled me to start a meal planning service.

I truly started before I was ready. As soon as I had the idea, I jumped in with two feet and committed to creating a meal plan each week. In the first year, I had a couple hundred subscribers so it felt like a huge success and was super encouraging. I want to serve more people with what I developed so I’m in the process of figuring out how to sell in a way that feels like me and works. I am really energized by the fact that my meal plans serve people well. So, I plan to take that energy and let it propel the work of positioning the product in a larger market. At some point, I would love to be freed up by a team to focus solely on creating more tools to simplify healthy eating. I would also enjoy teaching the stacked method of cooking, possibly in workshop form, and think an Eat Real app would be amazing!