Everyone knows that eating healthy isn’t the easiest thing to do sometimes. Sure, you start out with the best of intentions, prepping our overnight oats and thinking through how you’re going to balance your meals along with your hectic schedule the next day. But before you know it, you’ve gotten an unexpected phone call, your meeting has been bumped up, one of the kids is sick and suddenly you’re eating peanut butter and jelly out of their respective jars with a spoon.

Which is exactly where the new, plant-based food delivery service Lighter comes in. “Lighter is like the easy button for eating well,” Alexis Fox, Lighter’s co-founder and “Chief Empowerment Officer” tells One Green Planet. “We transformed the entire unwieldy process of meal planning for the week – picking recipes, making a list, budgeting, shopping, dealing with check out, and getting the groceries home – into a 30-second digital interaction.”


With an extensive background in animal activism and lobbying for animal rights (Fox holds a law degree from Lewis in Clark Law School where she specialized in animal protection law, has worked alongside the Animal Legal Defense Fund and was the former director for The Humane Society Massachusetts), she saw an opportunity to make a difference for our pocket books, planet, health and for animals. While making quite a difference on her own merits, the inspiration to go into business was actually sparked in a surprising place-Hampton Creek. You know, the purveyors of that awesome mayo?

Of course you do

BBC

“I never considered business. Then my beau Josh Balk founded Hampton Creek with his childhood friend Josh Tetrick. I witnessed the company grow from an idea to an incredible force for good,” Fox told us. “The experience opened my eyes to the enormous opportunities we have to affect change through entrepreneurship.”

So, how does Lighter work? Basically, customers go to the website and sign up for the service, answering questions about their health concerns as they build their profile. Everything from eating more sustainably, losing weight or simply eating more healthfully on a budget can be accommodated, at which point a meal plan is generated for the week and the groceries are delivered directly to your door. It’s like having your own personal meal planner and professional shopper in one. For lot’s of us, this is as close to Oprah as we’re getting. Except, with the price ringing in at only $4 to $5.80 per meal, you don’t have to be Oprah rich to participate.


“You get a meal plan! You get a meal plan! Everybody get’s a meal plan!”

Given how busy the average person is in a given week, 30-seconds sounds pretty great! Plus, Fox and Lighter’s other co-founder Micah Risk (the “Director of Nourishment”) know what they’re doing when it comes to putting together healthy meals on a budget. Risk has a Master’s in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts as well as a family that needs to be fed on a budget, while Fox personally lost 45 pounds by eating a plant-based diet. “Because I understand how difficult it can be to change, I wanted to find a way to jump over the traditional barriers that get in our way,” she says.


Lighter’s dynamic duo, bringing healthy plant-based options right to your doorstep. Seriously, it doesn’t get easier than that, people.

The service that Lighter provides is currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Southbury CT, Stamford, Austin, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, Houston, Portland OR, and Boulder. If your city isn’t listed, don’t cry (or at least, not too hard), they plan on steadily adding more cities as time goes on, with immediate plans to expand to London, Montreal and Toronto, furthering their mission to help people eat healthy on a global level.

“The goal is simple: We want to reinvent our relationship to food. We want to make it easy for people all over the world to eat better.” Fox tells us. “We want people to choose Lighter not because it’s healthy or better for the planet, but because it is so damn convenient, tastes great, helps them stick to a budget and brings joy to their kitchen.”


Um, yeah, we’re gonna say we’d be way more excited about the makings for this showing up at our door than that Publisher’s Clearinghouse dude with the ginormous check.

At the end of the day, Fox’s background in activism and Risk’s nutritional know-how may prove to be just the combination the world needs to change their eating habits one bite at time. Easy, delicious, plant-based and affordable? Sign us up!

Image Credits (unless otherwise noted): Alexis Fox