Healthy meal delivery service adapts during COVID

Almost every night after his kids go to sleep, John Segreto drives from his home in Trumansburg to the 4-H kitchen in Ithaca to work. Alone in the building on Lower Creek Road, he chops carrots and green beans, sears chicken and ground beef and listens to the radio.

Twice a week, Segreto portions food into hundreds of meal-size, plastic containers, all destined to feed Ithaca and Binghamton folks for the next few days.

Segreto runs Power Full Food, a weekly meal preparation service, with his wife, Tina Segreto. They offer fully cooked, healthy meals, delivered to local businesses and homes. The operation began when John started packing lunches for his wife a few years ago.

“My wife was trying to get back in shape after having our first baby,” John said. “She works in sales, so she was driving all over the place and eating whatever she could get, so she wanted to start prepping her own food and enlisted me to do it. I’m more of the chef in the house.”

John and Tina are avid gym-goers, and soon their friends at Pallas Fitness in Ithaca were asking where Tina’s delicious-looking meals were coming from. John started making food for a few friends and thought that maybe he could turn it into a small business.

“I was going to school at Cornell for engineering, working on my Ph.D., and we had a baby,” John said. “I wanted to find a way to make some extra money for my new family. So, I said, ‘I’m just gonna put up a little website and see what happens,’ and we went from there.”

The response from the community was great, and shortly after launching the website, John took a leave of absence from his program at Cornell. He’s now a dad to two kids and a full-time chef, with 60 to 70 orders going out per week. An order could be anywhere from three meals to 20.

John and Tina took a unique approach to get their name into the community by partnering with local gyms. John hosted tasting events at the gyms and gave out free food to pique members’ interest. When a few people signed up for meal delivery, he installed a small refrigerator at the gym to make it a convenient drop-off and pickup spot.

In January, February and March of 2020, John said the business was doubling each month. But after being open for less than a year, COVID-19 shut things down all around them.

“We had a decent amount of customers associated with Cornell and Ithaca College and those people all left,” John said. “So, we saw a drastic drop in our orders.”

Gyms were closed for months, and Power Full lost a large portion of its customer base. But John said they quickly began acquiring new ones and began offering contactless home delivery.

“Over the next couple weeks and months, we evened back out to where we were,” John said. “We saw a lot more customers who were local professionals, people working from home who were trying to help with their daily routine to make their lives easier.”

Through the Power Full Food website, customers can purchase different meals each week or choose a plan and sign up for recurring delivery. Customers pick how many meals they want per week, with plans ranging from four meals a week for $35 to 20 meals a week for $165. Customers then create custom meals by choosing a portion size, a protein and two sides.

John said that his newer customers usually just want tasty, healthy food in a convenient way but the company also caters to people with more specific needs. Athletes or those on a specific diet from doctors or nutritionists use the service because it›s easy to keep track of everything.

Calories and macronutrients like fat, carbohydrates and protein are calculated at the bottom of the page as meals are built. Ingredient lists for each part of the meal are listed and are usually quite short. John said they keep things simple in an effort to appeal to those with even the strictest diet restrictions.

Longtime customer Jordan Vorhis said she and husband Brian Vorhis started using the service because of their busy schedules and specific health needs. Brian has colitis, a chronic digestive disease.

“It’s always been an issue in our relationship that when we make food, I want to make sure it’s going to be something that’s healthy and not cause a flare-up for him,” Jordan said. “It’s really nice to have something that we know is safe for him to eat.”

Jordan said she used to cook a lot of the couple’s meals in an effort to mitigate Brian’s symptoms and to fuel her through long days. She works at Cornell and is also a trainer at Infinity Athletics, a gym in Ithaca. When she picked up some extra shifts, she decided that a meal delivery service was worth trying.

“I like that it’s fresh and super healthy; it’s not over seasoned or processed,” Jordan said. “I like that it’s really convenient, and I don’t have to worry that we’re eating unhealthy just because I’m working so much.”

Now, the couple is expecting a baby, and Jordan has had to change her eating habits. She said that at the beginning of her pregnancy, she couldn’t eat what she was used to but still wanted to find healthy options. She said that Power Full was completely flexible with her new needs.

“I was talking to Tina a lot, and she was really helpful,” Jordan said. “I wanted to change what I was eating because certain things were making me sick. There were things I couldn’t even look at.”

John said that they are not delivering to gym refrigerators anymore because of the limitations around COVID but that they still have relationships with owners and members. He cites the camaraderie and support of the Ithaca and Trumansburg communities as a main reason for his success.

“I feel like I wouldn’t have been able to do this so easily somewhere else,” John said. “I get a lot of support from other businesses. People let us put up our posters and flyers in their businesses.”

John said he is undecided about going back to school but excited to keep working on his business. It recently partnered with The Eating Club to bring meals to Cornell residents, and he’s started reaching out to doctor’s offices and nutritionists to form partnerships. But the big future plans have to do with waste management, specifically all those plastic containers.

“I’ve always been an entrepreneurial person. This is not the end goal,” John said. “I want to try to start doing all reusable containers for our business and then try to expand to other restaurants. I want to become a central processor of those containers.”