For most, the recent pandemic was an unpleasant memory of masks, disinfectants, and 6-foot distances. But some good things came from Covid. And one is WECO: the food preparation and delivery service, born in March of 2020, as we plunged into the unknown. Many businesses including local restaurants closed their doors and laid off their employees.
Gavin Lambert, a chef at Woods Hill Table in West Concord, and his line cook girlfriend Rachel Amiralian, both lost their jobs. Amiralianl had an idea to create dinners to fill a void at a time when people didn’t have the option of going out for dinner and didn’t even feel comfortable going inside a grocery store. The first dinners were cooked in their Belmont apartment with fresh local ingredients. They were delivered to homes where customers quickly combined and warmed the ingredients and then sat down to enjoy a tasty, healthy meal.
Jennifer Fremont-Smith, who owned the apartment where WECO began, soon joined the effort as CEO. She says that during Covid “WECO was the only game in town for people to get something that was really good to eat.” For the first couple of years there was no marketing outside of Instagram and Facebook, only word of mouth, and clearly WECO was doing something right because they immediately began to grow. They soon moved their cooking and delivery operation to 251 Arlington St in West Acton where Savory Lane opened for business years ago and where the Orange Door Hospitality had recently closed.
After the first year, WECO had sixty employees and the list of towns they delivered to quickly expanded. Today they have over 125 employees and deliver all the way from Maine to Virginia. They outgrew the Acton location for their production cooking and moved the operation to Randolph while retaining the original spot for a test kitchen where new recipes were tried out and a number of lucky employees had the task of tasting these new ideas. Customers frequently email their suggestions to WECO and every email is read and considered. At times guest chefs, such as Derrick The from Sekali, and Irene Li from Mei Mei, are invited to the test kitchen where they cook, taste, and eat the potential new creations.
Fremont-Smith didn’t have any experience running a food service but she comes from a Michigan family where most of her siblings worked in restaurants. In her early years she was a restaurant worker and developed an appreciation for what they experience. That knowledge has carried over to how she runs WECO. Recently WECO won a best place to work award from the Boston Business Journal. Employees filled out confidential surveys and the award is a tribute to management’s style of running the company. Fremont-Smith acknowledges “how hard it is to make a living in the restaurant industry, it’s so taxing on the body, nights and weekends, holidays, time away from the family, long hours.”
Fremont-Smith’s business life ran parallel to her personal journey. A self described “serial entrepreneur” as well as a mother with young children, she moved with her family from Belmont to a farm in southern New Hampshire where they were able to reset their priorities. They grew their own food, prepared their own meals, and reclaimed dinner time as a time for the family to enjoy themselves. Fremont-Smith says, “We made a commitment to change how we ate, to turn off the screens, sit down with each other every night for dinner and try to eat healthier, and take it a little slower and we did that and it was great. It was really transformative, and we viewed what we were eating and how we were eating to be a big, sort of cornerstone of things getting better for us.”
And with WECO, meaning WE COok, Fremont-Smith and her company sought to reclaim the family dinner tradition for her customers. By providing restaurant grade chef cooked meals made of sustainable locally sourced ingredients that took only ten minutes to prepare WECO gave families the ability to relax and enjoy eating at the end of a busy day. The website says: “We’re all about bringing joy back to dinnertime.” And not just to their customers; WECO also provides free meals to food-insecure families as well as donating to many neighborhood groups.
Early this year WECO moved their production kitchen to a larger facility in Salem New Hampshire along with their corporate offices. But not to worry, the local customer pickup location, in the parking lot at 251 Arlington St., has been moved diagonally across the street to the rear parking lot of the building formerly occupied by the Middlesex Savings Bank.
Angela, a new mom, who sleeps little, posted on the WECO website: “We Love WECO. As a family with three little kiddos it gives us back our sanity in weeknights! Thank you for delicious home cooked food without the mental energy of grocery shopping, prepping, and cooking every night.”
To see WECO’s weekly menu, use this link and enter your zip code. Offerings change frequently and some favorites are always available.
Jeff Brown is the business beat reporter for the Acton Exchange and a WECO customer since January of 2021.