Chiyo: Your mom's favorite meal kit
Dinner at Divya's Kitchen with Irene Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of Chiyo
🚨We’re super excited to bring you this profile on Chiyo CEO and Co-Founder Irene Liu! But don’t stop there. Keep reading below to see our first ever Nerd Note from Grant. This week we did a round up of things that we think are cool on the internet. Let us know what you think!🚨
Ladies and Gentlemen - the boys are back.
After a brief hiatus to celebrate the end of the summer, your favorite food-related newsletter has returned with a fire new drop. Some fresh heat. It’s almost like we never left in the first place! Thank you all for continuing to read our words and for sticking around through occasional uncertainty. Without you there is no Served Supper Club. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Do you remember being a baby? I’m talking any age under like 5 years old or so. That beautiful period of human life where you are completely dependent on your parents, siblings, and occasionally neighbors to stay alive. That ruled. It’s probably the closest you’ll ever get in your life to being an A-list celebrity. When you enter a room, you immediately become the center of attention. People you don’t even know are complimenting you, telling you how cute you are. The radio plays the songs you want to listen to. The TV is running 24-7 with the shows you want to watch. It’s truly remarkable how much we, as a society, prioritize the wants and needs of little kids above those of adults. That sentence is not at all intended to cast judgment. I actually think it’s remarkable in a good way. Our children are our future, and we should do whatever we can to make them successful. Babies should eat the best foods to nourish their little tummies. They should have the best toys to stimulate their little minds. They should listen to Mozart and read bedtime stories every night. And there are so many products lining the shelves to help parents accomplish all of those goals and more!
But what about moms? If babies are celebrities, then moms are superheroes. They bring us all into the world, they take care of us. Why then does it feel like they step out of the spotlight after the baby is born? Infant nutrition is an estimated $100 billion industry globally. Postpartum nutrition is only an estimated $1.0 billion. Women’s health in general is only around $40 billion. That difference is insane to me, and one of the strongest warriors in the fight for mothers is Irene Liu, CEO and Co-Founder of Chiyo. That’s right. It’s Served Profile Time.
For those of you who have never heard of Ayurveda (I hadn’t either before researching Chiyo), it’s an ancient system of medicine that originated in India some thousands of years ago. It’s based on the fundamental idea that each human being has a unique composition of forces inside of them - called Doshas. When these forces get out of whack, you get sick, and you’re supposed to eat foods or undergo treatments that restore your original composition - called your prakriti. Chiyo, which ships nutritious meals directly to postpartum and fertility stage mothers all across the country, gets a lot of menu inspiration from both Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine. It’s kind of an east meets west situation. And at Irene’s suggestion we just so happened to have this dinner at Divya’s Kitchen, one of New York’s only plant-based Ayurvedic restaurants. Anything to get inside the mind of the Chiyo customer.
As a part of our pre-dinner song and dance, Grant, Irene, and I all took an online quiz to determine what each of our Dosha compositions are. We learned that I am a Kapha, Grant is Pitta-Vata, and Irene is a Pitta. Kaphas are patient and supportive. Pitta-Vatas are creative and bright. Irene, as a Pitta, is supposedly determined, ambitious, and intelligent. After getting to know her over dinner, I would say that’s an accurate description.
Irene tells her extremely impressive story as if it all happened by accident. She grew up in the LA area in a Taiwanese-American family. Then she did undergrad at Berkeley, consulted at Bain, got a masters in public policy from Harvard, and an MBA from Wharton. Now she runs Chiyo and was recently inducted into Forbes 30 under 30. Consulting was something she applied to on a whim back in college, and Chiyo was originally just a side project during her MBA. I think that while all of that is true, Irene is also being exceptionally humble. When you have determination, ambition, and intelligence, you tend to make things look easy. Irene is a Pitta through and through.
Now, as cool as its founder is, let’s dig into Chiyo a little bit. What started as nothing more than a landing page with a sign up box has grown 300% this year and will hit 7-figures by the end of the year. Irene and her co-founder Jennifer threw a simple website up to gauge interest in a meal delivery service for postpartum mothers. After organically getting to the number one search result on Google, they got a lot more sign-ups than expected. It was time to start shipping product.
Their boxes contain meals that are designed for your specific stage of maternal health - anything from fertility all the way to postpartum. Everyone on a given stage gets the same foundation of meals that week, but the broths and tonics are more tailored to the needs of individual customers. It’s a holistic nutrition program that pairs eastern food therapy with western nutritional science. And the concept of sending food to postpartum mothers is the standard of care in Asia. Irene saw her mom sending meals based on Traditional Chinese Medicine to her aunt after she had given birth. And boom! The idea for Chiyo was born.
It’s kind of ironic to me that someone who is admittedly bad at feeding herself is the CEO of a food-based nutrition company. Irene calls her style of eating “accidental intermittent fasting.” But she’s going through a bone broth phase (aren’t we all), and loves Hot Cheetos. She doesn’t like Takis. We actually had a slightly unhinged discussion at dinner about the merits of Takis vs. Hot Cheetos. To me, Takis aren’t real food. They’re like some unholy concoction of corn flour and the stuff inside of glow sticks. They’re like what would happen if you put a Hot Cheeto into the Captain America machine. I digress. Irene may not be great at remembering to eat at regular intervals, but she’s clear eyed when it comes to her vision for Chiyo. The thing that differentiates them from the bottomless pit of other meal delivery services is that Chiyo is extremely focused on an acute life transition in a woman’s health journey. Companies like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and even Factor are convenient, generally healthy, or weirdly easy to sign up for. They’re basically interchangeable, and I know people who cycle between them depending on who has the best promotion that week. Contrast that customer behavior with Chiyo, which provides the foods that you need to get you through an extremely important part of your life. The postpartum period is a time where you need to be taken care of - both because you are overwhelmed with the life transition and because you are physically recovering from a major medical event. Just like how professional athletes focus on their diets, moms should do the same while navigating potentially the most physically transformative period in their lives. In addition to meals, Chiyo is also selling peace of mind. It just makes sense to pay more for a product that targets unique symptoms and concerns in specific stages of a woman's life rather than something that makes you “generally healthier.” Whatever that means. So on an unrelated note, keep an eye out for the new Served Supper Club Short Kings meal delivery service. Full of foods that might make men a little bit taller. Just kidding! We love short kings at Served.
The future looks bright for Chiyo with Irene at the helm. They have lots of cool potential partnerships in the works and are even experimenting with smart fridges in women’s health clinics and hospitals. One thing we didn’t know about was the economics of having your items on the shelf of a big box retailer. Let’s use the vaunted aisles of everyone’s favorite cult classic grocery store Erewhon as an example. In order to get the space in between the sea moss gel and oxygenated water, you would probably need to pay Erewhon a fee (sometimes thousands of dollars). You also have to give them a percentage cut of every product sold. It’s of course lucrative to sell out of these retail stores, and we wish Chiyo the best of luck on their future endeavors. Keep fighting the good fight for mothers everywhere. To stay up to date, you should follow them on Instagram @wearechiyo.
I also want to give Divya’s Kitchen a shout out for providing us with a healthy assortment of dishes that aligned with each of our respective Dosha profiles. We ordered paneer nori rolls, vegan sunflower mozzarella, stir fry with lentils, and the kitchari (a rice and lentil stew). All of the food was interesting. I was really intrigued by what the sunflower mozzarella would taste like. It was definitely not mozzarella, but that doesn’t mean it was bad. The texture was a bit like a thick gel, but the flavor was close enough to mozz to go well with the tomatoes on the plate. If you’re really hungry, do what Grant and I did and go get a slice of pizza afterwards. Village Square has a banger pepperoni square. Prince Street Pizza who!?
Since I know you’re all curious, I will of course tell you what restaurants Irene likes. She’s actually based in Detroit but comes to New York for business every so often. When she’s here, you can find her dining at Bobo in the West Village. She also called out Como’s in Detroit for serving great pizza. Irene had never been to Divya’s Kitchen before, but I think we all enjoyed that experience.
Like or comment if you liked this newsletter. And keep sending us interesting people to profile! See you next time we press send.
Served,
The Supper Club
Grant’s Nerd Notes #1: Cool Sh*t on the Internet
Will and I send each other a lot of text messages about cool sh*t we find on the internet. We realized this might be of interest to some of you, so, we’re letting it rip. Let us know in the feedback form if you want to see more of this / what you want to see.
Niche newsletter of the week: Popping Tins
This entire newsletter is about reviewing tinned seafood. It’s written by an eloquent and thoughtful narrator, Tim Marchman, who’s based out of Philly (sounds a bit like someone else we know). Beyond food reviews, there are a lot of interesting niche food facts. For example, I learned about natto in this particular edition here.
Video: Making the Stinky, Sticky, Slimy Beloved Superfood of Japan: NYrture Natto
Served is a vehicle for Will and I to dig really deep into random food topics. Justin Mares (serial entrepreneur and founder of Kettle & Fire) talks a lot about this concept called “Edge City” (you should check out his awesome newsletter, The Next). The more time you spend on the “edge” of a certain field, the more likely you are to find some interesting niche that is not mainstream yet, but has mainstream potential. Every good idea is crazy until it's not. He calls this Edge City, but the big brains over at Served call this “Seeking Culinary Alpha”. In 2014, that was bone broth. In 2023, I think it might be natto? For those who don’t know what natto is (I didn’t until this week): natto is a dish of fermented soybeans. The outcome is this sour, cheesy tasting dish jam-packed with nutrients and wellness benefits. Again, I’ve never had it but this video made me want to try it. If natto can even remotely follow in the footsteps of other great Japanese exports (sushi, ramen, shinkei, matcha), then I think we have some Culinary Alpha here.
Portugal Food Facts: 10 Things We Bet You Didn’t Know (link)
I’m currently in Lisbon with my girlfriend, Reagan, so naturally I sought out some Culinary Alpha before arriving. Some things I found interesting:
“When Portuguese princess Catarina de Bragança married English King Charles II in 1662 and moved to England, she carried tea leaves in her luggage. The only Portuguese royal to ever become Queen of England would completely change British culture with her habit of drinking tea and eating cakes in the afternoon.” This blew my mind.
“Pastel de nata (Portuguese Egg Tart) has no cream.” This little tiny delight is absolutely ridiculous. It tastes as if creme brulee and a croissant had a love child. I can’t stop eating them. Oddly enough, it has no cream in it even though nata == cream? Nada nata. Lol.
“There’s a Pork Sausage without Pork Meat”. During the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century the Jewish people in Portugal hid their beliefs by creating alheira, a dried sausage that is actually made with chicken and bread instead of pork.
More Nerd Notes pls
About time a newsletter came out as pro short kings. Hope others follow suit