Jenny Irvine has, winning her company a BT Essence of the Entrepreneur award this week.
The former restaurant concept developer – who worked with the Cinnamon Club, Conran and the Deals Restaurant Group – says that she realised she never had time to prepare a good meal, and neither did anybody else.
"People know they should be eating well. Usually they are so busy they don’t have time to do it for themselves. You need someone to put it in front of you – ‘Here it is, voila.’ We take the guilt away."
She says that she has made a business out of "good old fashioned getting things done."
The Pure Package, based at the New Covent Garden market near the MI6 building in Vauxhall, central London, offers to deliver a full day’s worth of fresh, nutritionally sound meals and snacks, silently, to the customer’s doorstep by 6am.
Obviously aimed at the "cash-rich time-poor" of the capital’s workforce, the service is not cheap – costing from £26.95 a day. But it is pulling in the right kind of customers to make a profit. Clients include celebrities such as X-Men actor Hugh Jackman, Mrs Irvine says.
Diet to your door
Using nutritionists, the company offers a personalised diet programme, incorporating food allergies and avoiding sugar and wheat as a matter of course. Ingredients are free range or organic.
Mrs Irvine, 30, says that the company takes away the need for health-conscious customers to meticulously plan every meal and snack, source and buy the ingredients and cook them. And it stops them buying less healthy food on the run or microwaving a frozen curry.
Impressed by The Pure Package’s insight and modern networked business, that employs the internet and networking technology to great advantage, BT named the company as one of its Essence of the Entrepreneur Top 20 this week. The award recognises companies with less than 75 staff who are "doing something unique as a response to the changing world."
Andrew McGregor, head of marketing and strategy at BT Business, said that judges with experience in the food industry were particularly impressed with Mrs Irvine’s idea and the execution of it – such as using celebrity endorsements to market the product.
Instead of presenting one overall winner with an award, all 20 company heads are to be photographed by celebrity photographer Perou and the images will be exhibited at the Oxo Tower in mid-June.
