2020 has been off to a rough start. I haven’t begun any of the resolutions I made for myself. My car and my apartment are a mess, my skincare routine is nonexistent and I haven’t gone grocery shopping since last year. I have the same resolutions that many people have about a new year; be more active and eat healthier. So far, I’ve been a recluse eating like garbage, but we’re only two weeks in and despite my positive feelings towards self-improvement, I also think it’s important to be gentle to oneself. I’ve been living in Traverse City for just over six months and right now I feel radically different than I felt when I first moved here. Back in June, I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to run my home, social life, work-life and relationships without flaw and it was frustrating when I realized that it wasn’t possible. Eating healthy and consistently going grocery shopping is always a struggle for me, and going to an empty fridge at the end of a long workday is not fun. Meal service kits like Blue Apron and Freshly have gained popularity as an option for weekday meals that don’t require a trip to the store or scrolling through food blogs or Pinterest for dinner ideas. The downside of national meal kits is that it can be difficult to track down where exactly the ingredients come from. Whisk TC is a local meal kit service that’s run by Shannon Hitchcock, and she shops and prepares all of her ingredients in Traverse City.
“We do about 100, 122 dinners a day.”
Shannon is the owner, recipe curator, food assembler and delivery driver for Whisk TC. Her day starts when she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to get her kids ready for school. She then grocery shops for everything she’ll need for preparing the day’s dinners.
“Every morning I shop between 6:30 and 8:30. I have a list of what I need and print out all my recipes that I’m doing for the day. I only shop for that day. I come here, wash everything and just start working on prepping the recipes.”
She didn’t plan on making a business out of making meal kits. Initially, she started when she and her husband lived in Colorado where they had a few vacation rentals that they ran.
“I lived in Estes Park, Colorado which is very similar to here. Very touristy. I was a realtor and we did a lot of vacation rentals. There was no place to get food. People are coming in from all over people are coming in late, we had one grocery store. In the summer that grocery store was the busiest Safeway in the country and it’d be an hour standing there to check out. So I thought I’d make a list of food and put it in the rentals so that when people got there they had food.”
She and her husband are both from Michigan and at the time they had a four-year-old and a two-year-old. They were at a crossroads for where they wanted to settle and raise their children. When she and her family moved back to Michigan she knew she wanted to live in Traverse City, but she didn’t know that she would start making food for people again.
“We came here and flipped houses for a couple of years and then I started this again for vacation rentals.”
Shannon mostly serves busy families now and word of mouth has been her biggest source for advertising. The menu rotates every two weeks, and Shannon keeps recipes from repeating more than once every three months, except for crowd favorites.
“I constantly Google new recipes, there’s a lot of blogs I follow. Some of the recipes are mine that I made up. ”
Customers can order dinners based on the size of their family, and how many times they’d like kits delivered to their home. Orders are made through the website and kits contain everything you would need to make dinner, with all the ingredients chopped, measured and ready to use.
make dinners, soups, salads and desserts with favorites being dishes like roasted asparagus, red pepper & bacon quiche and asian chicken lettuce wraps. If you’re like me, your 2020 track to being healthy has already been dampened, but not to worry. It’s easy to get back on track, and Whisk TC can take some of the stress off of daily life by making weeknight dinner easy.
© 2023 - 910 Media Group
