Prioritizing Home-Cooked Meals Over Nutritional Labels

If you’re a Feast & Fettle member, you know it's in our DNA to obsess over your feedback and adapt our service accordingly. So when we started hearing calls for nutritional labels on our meals, we had to take action. We rolled up our sleeves and formalized a database of our recipes.

After months of hard work, we were finally ready to unveil our project. But as we prepared to launch, something didn't seem quite right. Seeing these labels left us with a feeling of uncertainty around the question, “will these labels benefit the mental and physical health of our members?”

It was at that moment that we took a step back and thought about our mission to provide the warmth and comfort of stress-free, home-cooked meals. Our ultimate objective is to assist our members in feeling their best through nutritious meals they can trust, all while reducing meal related stress. 

After much thought, we realized that rolling out nutritional labels would be a mistake. To those who have been holding out for nutritional information from F&F, we apologize and humbly ask that you continue reading as we explain our reasoning for this decision. 

It's important to acknowledge that nutritional labels aren't inherently bad. They can simply be misleading. Stats like calories, fat grams, and sugars are not all created equal (i.e. natural sugars vs processed sugars) and while low calorie labels can be attractive, too often these foods contain processed and artificial ingredients that lack essential vitamins and minerals or leave out nutrient rich ingredients that our bodies need. These labels can diminish our ability to eat intuitively, increase stress and cause us to spiral into unhealthy eating habits.

We also felt it was important to stay true to our roots and allow our chefs to iterate and improve our recipes, oftentimes on-the-fly. Feast & Fettle began as a private-chef service in 2016, and we've always prioritized providing a home-cooked meal experience for our members. Introducing nutritional labels would not only limit our chef's ability to taste test and refine, but also felt like it would start us down the path of becoming a "cookie-cutter" service that manufactures food, rather than preparing your meals with attention to detail and care.

We believe the key to good health is to eat real, high-quality ingredients, to listen to our bodies, and to practice variety and balance. The numbers on a nutritional label have been given too much importance and we won’t let a food label minimize our nourishing meals into misleading percentages. 

Though we understand this won’t work for all, we believe in our decision and promise to always deliver the best, high-quality meals to you, our members.