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Interview Series Part 4. Greg Lam
Sliced Tomatoes
(604) 254-2545
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Delivering lines with Greg Lam
an interview series feature

By Jason Chin
Eat Vancouver Writer
Monday, July 16th, 2006

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking with Greg Lam, who recently started up Sliced Tomatoes, a service that delivers nearly prepared meals to be finished off and eaten at home. The ingredients are delivered in a blue cooler and consist of items such as sliced vegetables, chicken and sauce to be stir-fried, to a nearly done risotto and red wine-braised lamb shank to be heated up on the stove. There are some similar services around town, but none do it quite like Sliced Tomatoes, with their stress on excellent customer service, healthy (but still flavorful) food and my favorite, home delivery. Needless to say, I was excited to hear how all of this came about. I learned about how running this business is a lot like a restaurant at times, to their recent menu revamp in an interest to stay seasonal and local. The full transcript of our chat is below.

Jason Chin: What is your background, specifically in the hospitality industry? And led you to Sliced Tomatoes?

Greg Lam: My first job actually started at midnight in a family restaurant that operated 24/7. They needed a dishwasher, so my brother called me up and it went from there. I’ve worked in restaurants for about 5 years or so and I’ve done everything from washing the dishes, to cooking on the line, to making the drinks at the bar.

I started Sliced Tomatoes because I’m an entrepreneur, I just love working on new ideas. I knew that there was a huge demand for convenience foods and for healthy foods, but there weren’t many places out there that offered healthy food that was fresh, balanced, and convenient all at the same time.

The idea came from Japan. Over there they do a daily ingredient delivery service where they give you everything you need to prepare a dinner each day. You still have to chop up all the ingredients once you receive them, but all the hassle of menu planning and shopping is taken out of the dinner preparation equation. We modified it for the North American market in two ways. One, we do the prep work – the chopping – so as to make it more convenient. Two, we go to great lengths to make the food healthy.

JC: What separates Sliced Tomatoes from other similar services?

GL: It’s definitely the health aspect and the delivery aspect that separates Sliced Tomatoes from the rest. We actually work with a nutritionist and a chef to plan our menu so that it is both healthy and tasty. We do whole foods, foods that are processed and refined as little as possible. We soak our grains and beans before cooking to make them more digestible and easier for people to absorb the nutrients. We make most of the items on our menu from scratch. We also make sure our meals are balanced with protein, starch, and veggies.

The delivery part is just a way to make it easy for people. You just get home from work, open your door, pick up the cooler, and start to cook. I don’t know how to make it much easier than that.

JC: Why “Sliced Tomatoes?”

GL: After an unfruitful brainstorming session with my partners, I asked my wife what she thought would work for a good name. She thought that tomatoes were cute. So, we rolled with that idea for a few minutes and came up with the name Sliced Tomatoes. Sliced represents the convenience we offer by doing all the prep work and tomatoes represents the fresh and healthy food that we provide.

JC: Briefly, what is an average day like over at Sliced Tomatoes?

GL: It starts early for our staff, at 6AM actually. Our dinner rush runs up until 11:30AM as we have to have all our cooler boxes out the door by 12PM in order to deliver them to everyone’s homes and offices by 5PM. There’s not much cooking involved, since most of the ingredients are raw. Instead, it’s a lot of prep work going on. In a restaurant you can get that rush when the pressure is on and you have 100 customers clamoring for food right away. With Sliced Tomatoes, there still is that pressure to get the food out the door, but you don’t really see the customers, so it’s definitely a calmer
version of what you’d see on a cooking line in a busy restaurant.

JC: When trying your service, I enjoyed the amount of control I felt over what I was preparing. What are some of the other benefits of preparing one’s own meal?

GL: The major benefits are is that you know what’s going into the meal. We give full ingredient and nutritional information, so you know there’s no hidden additives or preservatives lurking around. You can control your seasoning levels to a degree and you can cook your food according to how well you like your food done.

JC: How would you respond to those who might say that if paying for a meal, they would rather go out for dinner?

GL: You pay for a meal whether it’s in time and money spent shopping or it’s time taken out of your day to order and pay for food at a full service restaurant. So you’re paying in time and money whether you’re eating out or cooking at home. What Sliced Tomatoes is makes it easy to eat healthy, which you don’t get usually get at restaurants and takes a lot of time to do it yourself at home. When I go out for dinner it’s mostly for the social aspect.

JC: Your menu is full of a lot interesting dishes, such as an orange spiced salmon. Who designed your menu, and what were the main goals you were attempting to achieve with it?

GL: Our goals were that the meals had to be easy, healthy, varied, and of course, tasty. That simple.

We initially had three local Vancouver Chefs with varied backgrounds and one nutritionist help us design 100 meals for us to test. We ended up using about 1/3 of those recipes. The rest of the meals came and come from our chef Becky Troelstra.

JC: Is it difficult to balance nutritional value with flavor, as well as providing options for vegetarians?

GL: I don’t think we have any issues with balancing nutritional value with flavour. You definitely have to rule out some things or preparation methods, such as deep frying or heavy cream sauces. However, there’s so much room to make good food when you’re using fresh ingredients.

For vegetarians, 1/5 of the menu is vegetarian, which is not bad – but on the other side – 4/5 of the menu is off limits. So, we do provide options, but you definitely have less choice available to you.

JC: There is a whole lot of variance in your menu items, from a simple stir fry to a parmesan risotto that even Gordon Ramsay would love. Do you make any recommendations to customers based on ease of preparation?
Do you find some customers are scared off by such items?

G: We are introducing information pages on our website that specifically cater to different involvement levels, tastes, and diets of our customers. This will help them choose what suits them.

Do you mean scared off by complicated items? Honestly, I don’t know. I do know that people really enjoy the bake n’ eat line we have, which requires you to just heat an oven and toss the food in. I think it’s popular because it’s easy, not necessarily because they’re scared off by more complicated items.

JC: Vancouver is blessed with a good deal of local and seasonal ingredients. Do you attempt to keep the menu seasonal?

GL: We do try to keep it seasonal and local. In fact, we’re doing a menu revamp this July 9th to 13th in order to achieve those two goals. We’ll be trying to get more local sources of meats and produce. When you’re going more local, it works out that you’re also more seasonal.

12. I was thinking that suggesting a wine pairing with each dish might be a nice feature to have. Would you ever consider doing anything like that? Do you have any new features coming out soon?

GL: Wine pairing sounds like a great idea. Especially when we do our Friday Date Night Specials (it’s an idea for some time in the future).

New features, probably too many to list. We’re cutting down the ordering notice time from 48 hours to 18 hours. We’re changing up our men so that every week, there are 10-15 meals available every day of the week. Each week is a different set of meals, so for four weeks straight, you’ll have a different menu of 10-15 meals to choose from. Those are the major ones features we’re working on.

JC: When you dine out, what restaurants do your favorite restaurants?

GL: I like Okada sushi downtown. My wife’s Japanese and we always get frustrated when we go to places that don’t do it authentic, which is a lot of places. I usually eat non-sushi dishes, so can’t comment on their sushi (my wife says it’s good) and love their gyozas, tempura, spinach gomae, and karage. I find it’s a quiet place and affordable for the quality of food you’re getting.

Another place would be the Keg. It has good service, good atmosphere, and good food. I’ve actually had them screw up on a food order before. When they messed it up, they replaced the food right away, gave me a dessert, the manager came down to talk with me, and the whole meal was free. I couldn’t have asked for much more than that.