Our online shop supplying the finest restaurant quality food is up and running – a miracle that took place over one weekend. Although we made our first sale on our opening day, any Google guru will tell you that it takes some time for a new online business to really take off.
Desperate to keep our highly experienced cook and chef kitchen team going, we realised we could not wait for customers to come to us; we had to go to them. The question was how when the UK was on lockdown?
Essential workers, doctors and nurses at our local hospital, St George’s in Wandsworth, only 5 minutes from our kitchen in Wimbledon South West London, came to mind. The plan was to head to the hospital car park with frozen meal boxes ready to be popped into the oven to support the hardworking NHS staff.
Excited to get Mustard Family Foods in motion, we made a few phone calls to obtain the necessary permission to provide frozen meal boxes from the hospital car park. We were in luck – but we got something much better than a car park! While phoning around, we were introduced to Niall Barrett a member of Wandsworth Safer Neighbourhoods Team and his wife Janneke Diemel founders of Critical NHS, a non-profit organisation, supporting NHS staff during the COVID-19 crisis. Niall and Janneke requested our kitchen to provide hot meals daily to the evening and night shift NHS staff at St George’s in Wandsworth. This was exactly the kind of breakthrough we needed to keep our kitchen cooking!
Within 24 hours our kitchen was geared to deliver 600 hot chef cooked meals steaming with flavour every evening to our local hospital – 300 meals at 6pm and 300 more at 9pm.
Steaming hot meals ready to go to St George’s in Wandsworth
Some of the delicious meals the NHS staff at St George’s enjoy on a daily basis are our Pasta Bolognese , Provencal Chicken from our French Box and Jackfruit Penang curry from our Thai Box , to name just a few.
What an amazing and meaningful journey we have embarked on. It’s such a privilege to be part of it all.
“When we choose community over self-interest we change lives, including our own” – James Durrant, owner and CEO of Mustard Family Foods.
Witnessing the relief and pleasure our warm meals bring to the dedicated NHS staff members, give us a great sense of fulfilment, especially when receiving feedback like the following:
“On behalf of the department, I wish to say a huge thank you. The kindness and love we as healthcare workers have received has been overwhelming, and people such as yourselves have played a large part in keeping morale up in this difficult time” – a doctor at St George’s
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