Wilder
Now they’ve turned their obsession with healthy eating into a business.
The Caples are known for their longtime Upper Valley catering business, Coventry Catering, and as the former operators of the BoHo Cafe and Junction Cafe in the Hotel Coolidge building in White River Junction.
But you no longer need to be staging a wedding and ordering 100 plates of poached salmon with lemon caper sauce to enjoy items from the Caples’ menu. The couple has launched Let Us Do Lunch, a to-your-door lunchtime meal delivery service, as an extension of their Wilder catering business.
The emphasis — “brand” if you will — is on healthy and savory prepared lunchtime meals such as “super quinoa salad”; Buddha bowls; and tuna, turkey and hummus veggie wraps that are distinct from the sandwiches, potato chips, sodas and fast food that many people pressed for time order for lunch.
“We looked at the benefits we were getting from eating healthy and thought there must be other people out there who want non-GMO, organic and fresh meal at lunch but can’t always find it or have time to make it themselves,” Karen Caple said last week at her tabletop desk inside the couple’s commercial kitchen on Route 5 in Wilder.
Winter traditionally is a slow period for the catering business, so the Caples have taken advantage of a lull to redesign their workspace by setting aside one half of the kitchen to prepare meals for catering jobs and the other half to prepare lunches for the lunchtime meal delivery service.
Critically, Karen Caple said, they are scrupulously focusing on preparing lunches made from wholesome, organic ingredients in order to comport with Let Us Do Lunch’s purpose of “honestly serving the best quality food the chef can create and deliver to you during the workweek.”
The Caples’ lunchtime meal delivery enterprise is akin to online meal kit delivery services HelloFresh and Blue Apron, except the meals are already prepared with the assistance of a staff chef at their Wilder kitchen. Customers place orders online — somehow the www.letusdolunch.com domain name had not been taken before the Caples’ registered it — and then the website tells them the estimated delivery time their lunch.
The lunches are available for delivery from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday within a 4-mile radius of Wilder, so the Caples are able to serve Hartford, Norwich, Hanover, parts of Lebanon (including Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Centerra Business Park) and West Lebanon.
Menu prices generally range from $7.85 for soups and salad, $8.75 to $9.25 for bowls, $8.50 to $8.75 for wraps and $2.00 to $3.75 for homemade chips and desserts. A wide selection of kombucha beverages also are on the menu, the only beverage available other than cold-brew nitro coffee.
“A customer said ‘I wish you had Diet Coke,’ ” Karen Caple said. “I said, ‘No, we really want to stay true our brand.’ ”
Lynn Caple said Let’s Do Lunch, which had a soft launch in December before officially opening at the beginning of the year, hopes to form partnerships with area health clubs and businesses to deliver healthy lunches for employees. A multiple-meal discount program is in the works that will progressively lower the cost of individual lunches based on a five-, 10- or 20-day plan.
One business that already has signed up is Curves on Route 5 in White River Junction. Owner Tammy Latvis said she has a group of members who order their lunches before they begin their 30-minute workout three to four times per week.
The lunches are delivered to Curves, where members eat them after they’ve finished their workout.
“The options are great,” Latvis said, explaining the lunches feature the “low-carb, high-protein and fiber” diet that members want (Latvis said she is partial to the vegan Buddha bowl).
Karen Caple, her husband, Lynn, and Massay Hall, a new employee hired specifically for the lunch business, handle deliveries on top of kitchen work. The Caples also have brought on a chef to assist with the menu. Each delivery comes with a flat $1.25 delivery fee per order, no matter how many lunches, so if a group at the same office order lunch, for example, the delivery is $1.25 for the whole group.
“We did not want our food to be over $10 because it gets pricey then with a delivery charge,” Karen Caple said.
On top of pricing, the Caples make sure the business has a personal touch.
She inserts business-card-size printed notes in each order explaining the ingredients. They make their own salad dressings. A “Let Us Do Lunch” Facebook community was begun two weeks ago to share tips on healthy eating and already has 60 members.
The Caples, who live in Sharon, said they undertook a radical redo of their diets two years ago, making a conscious effort to eat better by using natural ingredients, sourcing produce and meats locally, and swearing off foods with artificial ingredients.
“When you’re young, you can eat anything you want, and we did,” Karen Caple said with a laugh.
The time demands and workload of raising nine children — including two sets of twins — typically meant the expedience of pizza and Chinese takeout over balanced meals.
But now the Caples’ grown children, who are in their 30s and 40s and spread out across country, are helping their parents discover the diversity of food choices available now but not to an earlier generation.
“I didn’t know what turmeric was,” Karen Caple confided about the spice commonly used in Asian foods that’s purported to have many health benefits. “I now use it in our Buddha bowls.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
