Stedi Meals targets tasty food with lower calories
A Northern Territory start-up has found the balance between taste and calories. Read how and who will benefit.
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Finding the balance between nutrition and taste is the holy grail for bodybuilders, wellness aficionados and anybody looking for a healthy life.
The theory goes that if it tastes good it isn’t healthy, but if it is healthy there’s zero taste and the challenge has been to find a happy medium that strikes a balance between flavour and calories.
A new Palmerston start-up is challenging the accepted rules around taste, nutrition and calories with a new line in pre-prepared meals cooked and packaged right here in the Top End.
Fitness veteran Andrew Mcdevitt has teamed with chef Dhan Marasingha to develop Stedi Meals, a new pre-packaged meal range that has an eye on calories, taste and cost.
A 15-year veteran in the fitness industry, Andrew knows the challenges of getting the calories and flavours right after three years of eating chicken, rice and broccoli showed him there had to be a better way.
He ran a gym for 10 years as well as an online training and nutrition business and said there was a market preparing food for the fitness industry.
The pair is packaging and selling about 200 meals in just the first few months since the business began.
Stedi Meals come in three calorie-counted sizes with Lean between 350-500, Balanced between 500-650 and Gain between 650-800 calories per meal.
But the difference between a Stedi Meal and other calorie-counted offerings is the range of meals offered.
Dishes include beef mince and sweet potato, honey soy chicken and white rice, lamb and mashed potato, diary free napoli prawn pasta, pork belly and vegetables, birria chicken and rice and creamy chicken and mushroom pasta.
Lean meals cost below $12 with the Gain selection costing about $16.
“The hardest thing to get right in fitness is the nutrition and most people don’t often have time to spend cooking and prepping and getting the calories right,” Andrew said.
“The meals we do are focused around calories because many people don’t understand how to track and calculate their calories, so Stedi Meals gets rid of that issue.”
Dhan said the pair spent months ensuring they had the balance right between taste and calories and that the uptake from the local industry reflected the need for a product tailored to body builders.
“It was a process of trial and error with me pushing for flavours and Andrew focused on the calories so it took a while but we got it right and the feedback is they taste great,” he said.
Dhan operates District North Kitchen in Yarrawonga, which frequently performs well in ‘tastiest burger’ surveys and is now looking to diversify through Stedi Meals.
“We just reckon that food should taste good, no matter how healthy it is and there’s a lot of people involved in bodybuilding who want taste as well as calories.”
Originally published as Stedi Meals targets tasty food with lower calories
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