‘We had orders straight away’ – demand for HameCooked delivery service exceeds expectations
Freshly cooked meals delivered from Tresta kitchen across Shetland
A NEW delivery service bringing freshly cooked meals direct to the door steps of folk across Shetland has become an instant hit.
HameCooked, the brainchild of Denise Laurie in Shetland’s West Side, has been flooded with orders since starting just two months ago.
And the surge in demand for the service – which operates from Laurie’s home kitchen in Tresta – has meant she has even had to reluctantly turn some people away.
Laurie – who uses fresh, local ingredients to create dishes such as butter chicken, lasagne and sausage casserole – said she had been left stunned by how quickly HameCooked has taken off.
“I thought it might take a couple of months before people had even heard of us, but we had orders coming in straight away,” she told Shetland News from her kitchen this morning (Monday).
“When I looked at it at the start, I realised there was no-one else doing this.
“I thought for people that can’t cook for themselves, or are too busy to cook, it could really take off.
“But we had quite a lot of orders in very quickly.”
HameCooked started in June as a meal delivery service powered by Laurie – who does the cooking and delivering – and daughter Jenna, who is in charge of the baking.
Each week people are offered the chance to order three main meals, a soup and a sweet treat, and to have them delivered straight to their door.
For Laurie, who moved to Shetland with her family in September, the idea came about organically.
“I took on a PA job when we moved up, and part of that was batch cooking,” she said.
“I thought, ‘I could probably be doing this from home’.
“I decided I would give it a shot, once I had run it past the family to see if it was okay to take over the kitchen.”
Before moving to Shetland, Laurie said she had never done any large batch cooking on this scale. But she said she had “always done a lot of cooking”, mostly for her family.
Around 30 main meals are cooked in the Tresta kitchen, as well as 10 soups, to be delivered out. So far Laurie is only cooking on a Monday and Tuesday, before taking her meals out on deliveries.
After speaking to Shetland News this morning, Laurie was heading as far south as Sumburgh on a delivery, before stopping off in Scalloway, Burra, Lerwick and Bixter.
“I’m delivering from Sumburgh all the way up to Mossbank,” Laurie explained.
“I did have a request from Unst, but I had to say no to that.
“I would say 30 meals and 10 soups is probably the limit since I have to do the deliveries as well, and unfortunately I have had to say not a few people already.
“I didn’t think that would be happening so quickly.”
A real emphasis has been put on using fresh, local produce – with locally supplied vegetables and Uradale Farm meat on the menu each week.
Laurie said she expected to be cooking meals like mince and tatties to start with for an elderly clientele, but she has been surprised at the variety of HameCooked’s customers.
“I thought we would get a lot of older customers at first, but it’s really not,” she said.
“It’s people that have busy lives and don’t have time to cook, people that work shifts.
“I’ve been able to do curries, and I hope to introduce some spicier things because that’s what I like cooking.
“A lot of the meals are things that we’ve already had as a family.”
A case in point is the sausage casserole, which is a firm favourite of Jenna’s. She admires one ready-to-go tub as she exhibits her Milka cheesecake, which is heading out for delivery today.
She explains that she has been whipping up things like brownies and cupcakes to go out as a sweet treat after the main meal.
If people do not want a curry – or anything on the menu – Laurie says there is a bit of flexibility.
“Most people will order the whole menu, but some will pick and choose.”
“Some people will say, ‘I don’t want that – can you swap it out for something else?’
“We also get a lot of people saying, ‘I really liked that, when are you going to do it again?’”
The feedback has been very positive so far, Laurie said, and she added that it “says a lot when people keep coming back and ordering more”.
As we finish up our interview and Laurie heads out for her deliveries, Shetland News asks to take a peek at a batch of butter chicken that has not long gone in the oven.
But – testament to the family’s link to the HameCooked menu – Laurie tells us that batch is for their tea tonight.
“That one’s just for ourselves,” she laughs.
You can find HameCooked’s menu by going to their Facebook page.
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