Myles Hopper from Mindful Chef – Food for Thought

One tranquil summer’s evening in Lympstone, Devon, a gaggle of school friends headed on a fishing trip on a boat named “The Compass Rose”. They watched the local fisherman WhatsApp the villagers about their catch of the day and questioned how this direct relationship from producer-to-consumer could be replicated on a national scale. After putting their heads together, they finally reeled in a whopper of an idea to make “healthy eating easy”, and Mindful Chef was born. 

Along with fellow founders Giles Humphries and Rob Greig-Gran, Myles Hopper quit his job in 2015 to set up Mindful Chef. The team started out in a one-bedroom apartment in South London, packing boxes, photographing dishes with an old SLR camera and delivering boxes themselves. Since their launch, the health-focused food box company has now shipped over 20 million meals delivered to more than 287,000 customers from small farms and producers up and down the country. They pride themselves on high-quality provenance, supplying meat that is grass-fed, chicken that is free-range, fish that is fresh, and vegetables that are grown in the most sustainable way possible. 

“We were all west-country boys born and bred,” Hopper says. “Having access to great local food on our doorstep, friends that were farmers, and being constantly outside surrounded by the country and wildlife meant we always had an inherent interest in where food came from. We wondered how could this food start having a positive impact on people’s lives?”

Hopper, Greig-Gran and Humphries had always planned to start a business together. After that fateful fishing trip, they realised the importance of giving people better access to food that is sustainable, healthy and ethical. 

In the early days, all of the Mindful Chef produce was sourced from their home turf of Devon and Cornwall. Soon the business ballooned, and their customer base was “60 per cent outside of London and 40 per cent within”, so they now use a whole orbit of suppliers across the UK. From Steven, who grows the quinoa in Shropshire, Scott, who is their honey expert in Powys, to Lee, their red meat specialist in the beating heart of the Yorkshire Dales.

“We love travelling to our community of suppliers,” says Hopper. “From going to Norfolk to see the free-range chicken or heading down to the Cornish sea to harvest some seaweed, one of our core values is to show the faces behind the brand and build up a community through this kind of storytelling.”

For someone unfamiliar to the pragmatics of food box delivery services like Mindful Chef, Hopper explains it as such:

“You can take a look at the menu online, and the recipes change every week. There’s an option to pick for one person, two, or for a family. All of our menus are gluten-free, dairy-free and low-carb to give customers a higher level of choice. You pick the recipes, and we send all of the food which is pre-portioned with step-by-step recipe cards.” 

For a flavour of the sort of thing Mindful Chef offers, here is a sample of this week’s menu: Korean turkey mince and kimchi rice bowl, Pesto egg & smoked salmon wraps, Sundried tomato chicken minestrone, Fish tikka masala, black rice and coconut, Middle Eastern spiced chicken with pistachios and Shawarma pheasant with lentils & rainbow chard. 

Despite 8.4 million people living in food poverty, the UK throws away an astonishing 9.5 million tonnes of food waste in a single year, and billions of pounds are wasted year on year when food is disposed of unnecessarily. Can small businesses like Mindful Chef help us re-evaluate our wasteful consumer habits?

“Food waste is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, so sustainability and high-quality producers are core to our brand,” Hopper says. “There is no food waste at all within our box. You get a little bit more packaging on some items, but the overall carbon footprint is far lower than supermarkets.”

“What’s more, any box reduces the cognitive load for those of us who are too busy to go through the big debate of ‘what to eat tonight’. Through Mindful Chef, you can find the time to sit down and create a meaningful, shared experience with family and friends. There’s no need to worry about ‘healthy earing’ as that’s our job, and we take the worry away.”

Mindful Chef became profitable for the first time during the pandemic – 2020 sales figures were up 230 per cent on 2019 – aided by customers who were keen to have their food delivered instead of joining lengthy supermarket queues or risking Covid-19 transmission.

“We had five years of growth overnight!”, Hopper says. “People are now more comfortable with buying food online. In the post-covid-world, who really wants to go to a Tesco Express at the end of a long day and whack something together? Why not head straight home, cut out the middle man, and decompress cooking a meal and have a sit-down dinner. The pandemic has shifted where online groceries are moving, and soon enough, younger generations will find it baffling what we ever had to queue in supermarkets.”

Since being certified as a B-Corp, social impact outside of healthy eating has become core to the company’s ethos. From their work with the charity, One Feeds Two, to cleaning up 12,500 litres of plastic from beaches, donating tens of thousands of items to food banks and giving discounted meals to NHS workers. 

“Our work with our main charity partner, One Feeds Two, is our proudest achievement,” says Hopper. “For every meal we deliver, we donate a school meal. In fact, Giles and I went out to Malawi to see the children and speak to the teachers, who said that for 60 per cent of the children, it was their one meal of a day. When we crossed the milestone of giving one million meals, it was amazing. But, in 2021, we reached ten million! If we can do that, as a small company, more companies should follow, and we can start making inroads into bigger and better things.”

Another moment of great pride for Hopper was recently moving into a spanking new 7,000 square foot office space in Wandsworth, replete with a gym and cooking facilities like their 8-station Masterchef style kitchen. “It’s that moment of realisation where you remember starting in a one-bedroom apartment, moving to a tiny office, then working from home and now having a proper space to build the business — it’s a great feeling.”

For Hopper’s last ever supper, he resolutely chooses to not dine alone. “I’d like a bit of a party or a crowd; it’s important that I have people around me,” he says. 

For the starter, he picks “an array of Spanish tapas – from olives to ham and croquettes”. For the main course, “a big sharing Mexican feast, with fajitas, tapas, and quesadillas all on the table,” and for dessert, “a big chocolate fondant with ice cream.” To drink; “an organic red wine from Italy.”

Whether he is foraging for seaweed in Cornish coves, meeting suppliers up and down the country, cooking with celebrities such as Fearne Cotton and Ben Fogle, or testing out lip-smacking recipes for the week, Hopper’s life is anything but monotonous. “What I love about the job most is anything to do with community,” he says, “from the suppliers to the customers, it is all about that shared experience.”

You can get £40 off your first four boxes here.

Mindful Chef’s recipe for Korean Pork Bibimbap with Seared Pak Choi (serves two)

Serve sticky Korean-style pork — slathered in a miso, honey and paprika sauce — over rice in Mindful Chef’s interpretation of bibimbap. Dish it up with grated carrot and pak choi, and crown with an oozy egg.

Ingredients

1 carrot
2  eggs
25g honey
2 spring onions
1 pak choi
1 tsp smoked paprika
2 free-range pork loins
80g brown rice
2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
2 tsp white sesame seeds
½ tsp shichimi togarashi
1 tbsp white miso paste

Method

Boil a kettle. Trim the pak choi (keep the root intact) and quarter lengthways. Bring a pan of lightly salted water to the boil and blanch for 45 seconds. Remove from the pan, refresh in cold water, drain and set aside. Rinse the rice, then place in the same saucepan. Simmer for 25-30 mins, then drain.

Peel the carrot and grate. Thinly slice the spring onions.

Make the sauce; in a bowl, mix together the miso, honey, vinegar, paprika and shichimi togarashi.

Season the pork with sea salt and black pepper. Heat a frying pan with 1/2 tsp oil on a medium-high heat, then fry for 4 mins on each side. Add the pak choi alongside, cook for another 2-3 mins until the veg is golden brown in places, then remove and keep warm. When the pork is cooked through, remove from the pan to rest for a few minutes, then slice. Keep the empty pan on the heat, add the sauce and simmer for 1-2 mins, until reduced slightly. Add the pork back into the pan and cook for another 1-2 mins, until sticky.

Heat a small frying pan with 1/2 tsp oil on a medium-high heat. Fry the eggs for 2-3 mins, until the white has set but the yolk is still runny (or to your liking). Stir half the spring onions through the rice (add 1 tsp sesame oil, if you have it).

Serve the pork with rice, carrot, pak choi and fried eggs. Garnish with the remaining spring onions and sesame seeds.