Craving delicious, good-for-you food at home, but not so into cooking? One of our fave pandemic-born businesses, Tractor At Home, delivers chef-prepared meals and seasonal fare via a handy subscription service to residents in Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, the North Shore and, most recently, Surrey and Langley. We asked co-owner and co-founder Meghan Clarke to “dish” about all things Tractor At Home, plus get her top tips on how to make this customizable meal service work best for you! —Noa Nichol
Hi Meghan! For those who don’t know, when and why did you launch Tractor At Home?
We launched Tractor At Home at the end of 2020. As a restaurant group in Covid, we have had a very challenging few years. More than half of our restaurants are located downtown in office towers, which have been vacant due to everyone working from home. It has been a devastating time for our business but we also knew early in the pandemic, that we had an exciting opportunity to get our everyday healthy foods into homes.
What niche were/are you aiming to fill?
We know everyone needs to eat. And with everyone at home, this was an opportunity to build on our existing café menu of approachable healthy soups, stews, salads, bowls, and offer more breakfast, lunch and dinner meals. As a family with two working parents and two children, cooking three meals a day seven days a week can be overwhelming. Tractor At Home is meant to provide healthy and delicious options for people who want meals that are wholesome and fresh and require little to no prep. We heard from friends and family over and over that they didn’t mind cooking but wanted the option of having some healthy home cooked meals where they didn’t have to do all the prep. Tractor At Home is really meant to fill this niche.
Who is Tractor At Home for? How does it work?
Tractor At Home is for just about anyone … families, young professionals, retired people. Our menu is comprised of both single serve meals as well as meals that are built for family style dining. We use high quality, fresh ingredients and aim to offer competitively priced meals in the hopes that customers will rely on Tractor At Home to fill their fridge each week with a variety of foods. Whether it’s our breakfast wraps, fresh lunch salads or roast chicken and veggies family dinner, our goal is to create meals that are fresh and easy to put on the table. Each week we suggest meals in your box and you adjust or completely customize your box by shopping our online store. We show up with your meals the same day each week. Leave your reusable jars, and freezer packs at your front door and we pick them up when we deliver your next box. You can pause or cancel your box anytime. It’s really that simple!
What kinds of chef-prepared meals and grocery/pantry staples are currently available? Anything new and exciting on offer?
We offer beautiful salads, soups, stews, one-step mains like lasagna, mac + cheese, enchiladas, etc. We also offer complete meals such as Chicken Verde Tacos, Souvlaki Chicken with Orzo Salad and Greek Potatoes, Thai Green Curry with Tofu. We also offer some of our signature Tractor salads that you will find in our cafes. We are becoming known for our clean proteins such as Garlic Dijon Marinated Sockeye Salmon, Oaxacan Marinated Flank Steak and vegan and gluten-free offerings. Each week there is a new feature menu item.
How often do the meal offerings change, and are they seasonally or otherwise inspired?
We have a core menu of staple meals on our online store, plus each week we offer a new feature meal. Our menu is very seasonal and we are currently working on our spring/summer grilling menu. Bring on backyard BBQ season!
What are your top tips around customizing our Tractor At Home order to suit our household preferences?
Great question! The weekly feature is always very popular and appeals to many. Because you can completely customize your box and it’s flexible, you can try a few different format and then decide what works best for your household. The beauty of our service is if you have household members with different preferences you can build the box for those different palettes. For our family, we always get the breakfast wraps and then some of the one-step mains and single serve salads for lunches. My kids love the chicken tenders and rice in their thermos for school and for dinner the family format meals work really well.
We think Tractor At Home also makes a great gift! Your thoughts around that?
Yes we totally agree! We have had many requests over the past year from people who want to gift fresh, nutritious meals to family and friends. We are perfectly set up to do this with our online platform and delivery system. Customers often gift Tractor At Home to friends and family who have had a baby, recently moved, lost a loved one, are sick, and generally just want a break from all the meals. We continue to receive feedback that this one-time gift box is incredibly well received and it’s super easy for the “gifter” to arrange without having to even visit a store and then drop off to the recipient. We hope to expand our gifting capabilities in the coming months. Stay tuned!
As your delivery area has expanded (Surrey and Langley rejoice!), can you fill us in on any future plans for Tractor At Home?
Now that we deliver across all of Metro Vancouver and Lower Mainland, our hope is to continue to build these markets and build our customer base. Eventually we would love to expand to Vancouver Island and maybe neighbouring provinces.
Last but not least (we realize this is a tough, tough question): what’s your absolute fave, go-to Tractor At Home meal?
That is tough you’re right! Our favourite meals are the Turkey Zucchini Meatballs, Vegan Mac + Cheese, Kale Ceasar Salad, Chicken Burritos, Chocolate Pistachio Cookies and Tractor Hot Sauce of course!
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