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Date: 5/23/2022
BELCHERTOWN – Plated, a new meal service based out of Belchertown, offers home-cooked, local meals to meet any and all dietary needs.
Plated owner Nate Cartel said he shops, cooks and works with his customers to help develop their meal plans.
“I’m a personal shopper chef so I work with my clients to create individualized menus based on their dietary needs, wants, allergies, restrictions and then I do all the shopping for them for the week. I cook the meals in their homes, package them, label them, give them reheat instructions and then clean the kitchen,” he said. “Basically, they don’t even need to know I’m there and get a fridge full of ready to go meals at a professional chef level of cooking in your house.”
In some cases, Cartel said he suggests dietary ideas while in other cases he works more closely with his customers to meet their dietary needs.
Before launching Plated, Cartel said he has worked in a variety of different cooking environments.
“I’ve been a chef for 10 years professionally, before that I was in a non-profit and before that I was the manager of the Mullins Center in the operations department. I’ve always been in service and even with the nonprofit I would end up cooking a lot of the banquet meals and charity functions that we had,” he said. “I’ve always had my hand in cooking.”
Cartel said his new business isn’t his first rodeo when it comes to personalized dinners.
“I had a business years ago called Haven Foods, and I was in Amherst, and we had an industrial kitchen, and I was doing Paleo fine dining delivered to your door. We were successful but had to close for myriad factors outside of the business’ control,” he said. “I thought it would start again someday.”
Prior to starting Plated, Cartel said he was working as a sous chef.
“I was the sous chef at a prestigious boarding school in the Valley and the hours weren’t great and the health of my family was suffering, so we kind of took a look and my partner Shirley said, ‘Why don’t we put a feeler on Facebook and see if anyone would be interested in having you be a personal chef,’” he said.
Following the reach out on Facebook, Cartel said he received 15 messages in the next 24 hours.
In the future, Cartel said he hopes to expand to a bigger kitchen.
“Ideally we want to move towards more of a model where we have an industrial kitchen, we have a menu up every week and people can choose from preset selections as well as having a more personalized service,” he said.
As of May 17, Cartel said he had six clients he prepares meals for weekly.
“My goal is to get between 10 and 15 clients and once we are there is when we will start to look at moving into more of an industrialized kitchen because I as an individual could not do more than 10 to 15 clients a week depending on the meals they are getting,” he said.
In his current model, Cartel said he offers two different dinner packages. The first is three dinners per week at $100, plus the cost of groceries, which he said typically costs about $75. The second package is five dinners per week at $150, plus groceries, which he said averages about $125. Cartel said each dinner contains four meals. Clients are not responsible for the costs for spices, cooking oils and packaging materials.
Cartel said each individual meal averages out to about $12.50.
“We try to keep it within a reasonable budget and my clients have said their grocery and food bills have gone down because they’re not having to buy spices, because they’re not eating out as much, because I am utilizing the entire bag of carrots that I buy in multiple dishes so there isn’t food waste,” he said.
All of the dinners include locally sourced ingredients.
“It’s not just fast food from a restaurant, these are real ingredients; we use local farmstands, we use lots of the local grocery places in the area, if you want organic, we can go that way, so everything is really personalized,” Cartel said.
For those interested in signing up for Plated they can reach out via message on Facebook or Instagram @PlatedMA or by calling Cartel at 687-9073.