Over the past three years, sisters Adrianna Hecht and Laurenza Giosa have expanded their healthy meal prep service, WellFed, from their mom’s kitchen in Bucks County to a 3,000-sq-ft Northern Liberties space with a café, mini-mart, and a 40-mile delivery radius.
Menu items change weekly around a few staples, like the ground-turkey-and-cauliflower-rice “eggroll in a bowl” and the “OG,” a shredded buffalo chicken with sweet potato mash, but all the meals are gluten and dairy free, and designed for paleo and low-carb diets.
The focus, Hecht told Billy Penn, is on whole food ingredients and precise portions.
“Everything is made in house,” the 33-year-old co-founder said, down to the sauces, marinades and mayo. Other than avoiding the processed sugars and high sodium found in products from larger food distributors, making things from scratch allows the WellFed team to “accommodate different dietary needs or goals pretty much seamlessly.”
The week’s menus are posted on Mondays, with orders closing at 9PM on Fridays. Meals are prepped over the weekend and delivered between Sunday nights and Monday mornings. Subscriptions are available, as well as 5-, 10-, and 20-meal packages (starting at $60, $120, $240), but items can also be ordered individually for an average of $13 each, not including delivery fees.
There’s no minimum for orders, Hecht explained “because even two meals might make things easy” for parents, like herself, looking for an option to cover weekend culinary duties.
Menu items are weighed equally. Roasted pulled pork topped with cherry pepper relish; teriyaki-glazed salmon with quinoa and slaw; pretzel-crusted chicken fingers with a side of fries — all of WellFed’s meals contain five ounces of carbohydrates, three of vegetables, and a choice of four or six of protein.
The same goes for the weekly rotating selection of favorites; BBQ turkey meatloaf, buffalo chicken pasta, chicken fingers, and an “unstuffed” pepper bowl.
The aim, said Hecht, is to offer a variety of options for those counting calories or monitoring their nutritional intake.
“If somebody is tracking their macros, that information never changes,” she explained. “It makes it a lot easier for them to understand what to track or what’s in the meal.”
The hyperfocus on health stems from the sisters’ own lifestyle. “An overall theme in our lives since we were young was wellness,” Hecht said.
The siblings are certified instructors; yoga for Hecht, dance for Giosa, who had previously helped run their mother’s group fitness studio in Bensalem before graduating from the Art Institute of Philadelphia with a degree in baking and pastries. Besides being a co-founder, she’s now WellFed’s executive chef, developing most of the recipes she and Hecht come up with.
“I started with [making] healthy baked goods, and that trickled into making healthier recipes,” Giosa, 31, said. “I wanted to make delicious food that’s still good for you.”
Living in Las Vegas while her younger sister was in school, Hecht had a similar goal, running a café at the gym where her partner worked and taking on private catering gigs in what was the earliest iteration of WellFed, informed by years of cooking for her own paleo diet.
In 2020, she moved back to Philadelphia, landing a marketing job at Parx Casino, where Giosa had become a restaurant manager. When the two were furloughed at the start of the pandemic, they turned their full focus to the partnership they’d long been planning.
Their first week of business saw the siblings putting out 80 orders. Today, with help from a staff of eight, they average 2,500 meals delivered weekly to a customer base that’s grown to include professional athletes, even providing personal chef services for Georges Niang throughout his last season with the Sixers.
“I feel like that it says a lot about the type of food that we make,” Hecht said. “And how it’s prime for not just ‘performance people’ but also a prime example of how people should eat.”
Besides delivery, the meals can be picked up from several partner gyms in the area — No Limit in the Northeast, Vision + Fitness in Conshohocken, F45 on 117 Spring Garden, and Old City’s Evolve Fitness, owned by Hecht’s partner — as well as Organnon’s Natural Food Market in Newton.
For walk-ins, WellFed’s 444 North 4th Street hub features a “grab and go” selection of the week’s meals, as well as a 15-seat café offering smoothies, coffee from Little Key and a made-to-order breakfast menu. An onsite mini mart sells gourmet chips, cereals and condiments.
Currently, Hecht and Giosa are working on a further expansion, with two “Snap Kitchen-style” retail locations and a product line of bottled sauces and dressings and their house-made granola planned to launch later this year.
For more information, visit bewellfed.net.
444 N 4th St | 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Monday-Friday | (267) 262-9664
