BC Business
FED delivers healthy meals throughout the Lower Mainland and Squamish.
Making 21 food decisions every week can be quite daunting, but if we are what we eat then it’s important to cover all the bases.
FED is a subscription-based company offering ready-to-eat meals designed by dieticians that fulfill the nutritional requirements for adults as recommended by Health Canada. They have options for a smörgåsbord of diets: full nutrition, low-carb high-protein, keto, plant-based and diabetes.
“When you eat three meals with us every day, you get 100 percent of the macro and micro nutrients that your body needs,” says CEO Saba Marzara, who co-founded Vancouver-based FED with Elin Tayyar in 2018. The flexible model allows subscribers to choose how many meals they want per week and also track nutrients through a QR code. “We only want to deliver the food that you need,” adds Marzara. “We’re trying to reduce as much food waste as possible so nothing goes in the trash.”
The CEO’s inspiration to start a food business in her hometown came from living in different countries at the start of her career. “Eating locally and eating mindfully is something that cultures around the world do naturally, but something we don’t really do in North America,” she says.
In 2014, Marzara’s dissertation for her Master’s in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine placed her in Kenya to work on a biofortification project. To meet the vitamin A deficiencies that women and children were facing in the country, her project focused on increasing the nutritional composition of sweet potatoes, which is a staple crop in Kenya. She and her team created orange-fleshed sweet potatoes with higher contents of vitamin A, which was then lobbied for the government to subsidize.
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After graduation, Marzara landed a nutrition policy internship at the World Health Organization, and then went on to join the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome as a consultant. She worked on nutrition indicators—mainly the quality of diet for women of reproductive age—for three years before returning to Vancouver.
When discussing the biggest challenges facing their age group in North America, Marzara and Tayyar kept circling back to poor diets and diet-related diseases. “We didn’t see anyone in the food space trying to tackle it and that’s kind of where we came up with the idea,” she says of FED, which currently delivers to the Lower Mainland and Squamish. “I think we take it for granted that food is ultimately medicine for our bodies.”