Thank you all for your patience and words of encouragement to help us bring Real Food Blends to this point. I am so happy to announce that the store is now open and accepting orders at RealFoodBlends.com.   And as a mom of a tube-fed kiddo, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to provide these meals to all of you.

A few important tidbits for you to know:

–       Shipping: Orders will ship in 3-4 days, we can only ship in the United States for now and your entire order will ship for just $8.

–       Order Limits: We have limited each order to 2 cases of each variety (so 4 total cases now).  I wish we could send everyone as much as they want right away, but as a new company, this is our first  production run and we want to make sure as many people as possible can start enjoying our meals. As we gather feedback from each of you, we will move forward on to full scale production. (Remember, the meals are shelf-stable for 3 years!)

–       About the Chicken meal: UPDATE 2/5/14 You can now reserve 2 cases of the chicken meals. These will be sent to you by March 15th – still a flat rate of $8 for shipping on your entire order! [The chicken meal will not be available for purchase for a couple more weeks. (Long story short: USDA approval on the packaging took a long time!  Everything is approved now and printing of the cartons will happen next week.)]

–       More coming! We have already scheduled our next production run, but it will take us at least 10-12 weeks before we can start shipping more meals.  We are working as hard as possible to estimate demand, but we do expect to sell out of our meals quickly and there will be a delay before more meals are available.  Thanks in advance for your continued patience and support as we move toward full-scale production.

A few people have asked about the delay from when we had the meals made to actually being able to open the store.  Our meals were made at an FDA & USDA regulated facility and we felt it safest to then ship the meals to food-grade fulfillment centers to be packed and shipped to customers.  Believe me, I would have turned the store on, piled them in my garage and packed the boxes myself if I could have!!

Again, thank again for your support.   After we deliver these first meals, we’ll be moving quickly to full-scale production and we’re excited to be able to have these readily available to all of you. We look forward to getting your feedback.  Please stay tuned to email and social media, where we’ll keep you in the loop every step of the way.

Thanks and enjoy!

Julie Bombacino

PS – If you want to see our meals in action, this video shows me feeding my son AJ, our Chief Inspiration Officer,  the quinoa, kale & hemp meal:

We started Just Food Blends to change things for the better – to make it possible for tube-fed people to have access to real food meals and to make it easier for their caregivers to provide them with real food.

Just Food Blends will now be Real Food Blends. It’s a small change, but an important one. This change clearly demonstrates what we are all about: REAL. Real food. Real meals. Real connections. Real people.

Our meals – our company – are not JUST about food. Food is a cornerstone of how we bond with our loved ones, and come together with friends and family throughout our lives. It’s really not JUST about the food itself, but how the act and tradition of eating food together helps us create real memories and real connections with others. We hope to bring at least some of this real human and emotional connection back to eating for tube-fed people.

We truly believe everyone deserves access to real food and that a diet rich in a variety of real food is best. We also believe that our tube-fed loved ones can psychologically feel a little more ‘normal’ when eating real food, and caregivers can feel better giving them the same type of food they are eating. That just makes sense to us.

As we move forward with our first production run and start bringing these meals to the tube-fed world next month, we are excited to be Real Food Blends.

As always, thank you for your support!

Julie Bombacino
Founder & CEO, Real Food Blends

I’m proud to announce that Randy Lewis, former SVP of Supply Chain & Logistics at Walgreens has joined the Advisory Board for Real Food Blends.  You probably haven’t heard of him and maybe his title sounds beneficial from a business standpoint for Real Food Blends, but his value here extends so far beyond that.

Randy is a major believer – and implementer – of  “disability inclusion” programs. When at Walgreens, he made disability inclusion a priority, resulting in Walgreens Distribution Centers employing up to 40% of their workforce as disabled employees.

So what’s this got to do with Real Food Blends? Well, part of my dream when I started this journey was to employ disabled people, especially those that may need or have needed feeding tubes.  This isn’t “social entrepreneurship” or charity – this is personal. I don’t know what the future holds for my son AJ. My hope is that he is able to have a job one day and that there will be companies that see the value in employing people like him. And so…

Real Food Blends will be a company that makes disability inclusion a priority.  We are already working with our local disabled workplace employer to employ disabled workers to pick, pack and ship your orders.  As we grow, so will our commitment to disability inclusion.

Best,

Julie