Geet Jeswani, special to wtop.com
WASHINGTON – The concept of food delivery is no longer just for boxes of pizza and paper bags filled with egg rolls.
The industry is constantly expanding, with companies like Amazon.com and Peapod delivering groceries to their customers’ doors.
But one local startup is delivering an idea of its own for busy food fanatics. It’s not exactly dinner in a takeout box, and it’s not exactly a bag full of groceries. It’s somewhere in the middle.
“Being a young professional just out of college, it’s difficult to make a very good meal. You have to look up a recipe, go to the grocery store, you inevitably forget something, you have to go back. So we figured there had to be a better way to cook amazing meals and we set out to make it easier,” says Ryan Hansan, an American University alum and founder of scratchDC.
Each day of the week, scratchDC features a different dish, such as lobster and shrimp ravioli in a pink sauce or vegetarian spinach, goat cheese, black bean and brown rice Swiss chard roll-ups, baked in marinara.
The company — based out of a commercial kitchen in National Harbor, Md. — shops, chops, measures and mixes all of the ingredients needed to make a gourmet meal.
Customers place their orders on the website and wait for a box made out of biodegradable packaging to be delivered to their doors. Inside the box are instructions and all of the pre-measured ingredients required for dinner.
And scratchDC even caters to last-minute orders.
“We do same day ordering and delivering, so if you’re at work and you don’t want to go out to dinner, you don’t feel like going to the grocery store, you can just literally log on and place an order by 3 p.m.,” Hansan says.
Hansan and his team get started early in the day to prepare all of its orders for delivery. And the food selection is done with a local mindset.
“We try to stay as local as we can. Obviously, in winter there’s not much growing. But we source organically when we can,” says Hanson, who says the company is also sensitive to allergies and is currently working to expand its gluten-free options.
Watch what happens in the kitchen at scratchDC:
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