Entrepreneur Hayley Evans loves red bell peppers, but she has to be careful when she includes them in meals for her food subscription service Island Fresh.

“They can be expensive,” she said. “If we do include red pepper in a recipe, maybe we include it for one meal, but the other four meals during the week don’t have red peppers.”

Since starting Island Fresh two years ago, she has needed creativity to cope with skyrocketing food costs. Between February and March alone, the price of some common food items in Bermuda increased as much as 20 per cent,

To keep her prices down, she does a lot of work in house, printing her own stickers and labels, and vacuum sealing her own bags.

Island Fresh offers meal kits that come with pre-portioned ingredients and follow along recipe cards, delivered to clients’ doors weekly.

Ms Evans started Island Fresh when she saw an increase in demand for food delivery services in Bermuda during the pandemic.

“There was a need for services that are common in other parts of the world,” Ms Evans said. “There was a need for prepackaged food kits that people could cook themselves.”

Her target demographic are people between the ages of 20 and 30. She thought a healthy food subscription service would be ideal for busy couples who want to make the cooking process easier.

So far, her strategy is working.

“I feel like we just keep making strides,” Ms Evans said. “It has been very positive and exciting. When we started out in June 2020, we had 20 customers. I was roping in everyone and anyone to sign up for our services. Back then, we were offering recipes and food for three meals per week.”

Today, they have 60 to 80 regular customers, and offer food and recipes for up to five days a week, depending on the customer’s wishes.

Ms Evans is a pharmacist by day and runs Island Fresh in her spare time.

“What is good about the pharmacy is that we are on shift,” she said. “We are not a 9-to-5 business. The long days are my pharmacy days and the short days are my Island Fresh days.”

This does sometimes lead to late nights, but she is all right with that.

“We have a good team to do all of our packaging and a lot of the labour side of things,” she said. “At this point, I am curating menus and doing up recipe cards. That stuff did not take as long as actually packaging all the different ingredients and picking up the deliveries.”

Although she has no experience in the food industry, hospitality is in her blood.

Years ago, her grandfather, the popular Stanley Evans, and uncle, Harold Evans, ran the island’s top restaurant, The Penthouse, together with The Longtail Bar, both overlooking Hamilton Harbour from the corner of Burnaby and Front streets in the city.

“Those restaurants closed before I came around,” she said. “But within the family it has always been something talked about.”

Now her father, Richard Evans, is her “right-hand man” and co-director.

“Dad is my partner in crime,” she said. “He is mostly operations and pickups. Whatever we need, he does.”

A year ago she moved the base of operations from the kitchen at CedarBridge Academy in Devonshire to Wellbottom Road in Warwick.

“We now have our own equipment and all our ingredients in one spot,” she said.

One of her biggest challenges is accepting that she cannot please all of the people all of the time.

“I have created lots of options, but you can never quite hit everyone’s needs,” she said. “In this day and age, there are so many dietary plans and restrictions and allergies.”

While she does try to accommodate her customers’ needs, ultimately she has to cater to the majority.

A typical week’s offerings would be Indonesian-style nasi goreng, a vegetarian miso shrimp and arugula salad, a lemon grass chicken stir fry, and bangers and mash.

She tries not to repeat a meal within a three-month period.

“It has been a learning process and been very exciting and a great challenge, ” she said. “It has been really fun on the cooking side of things. To figure out what meals work has involved lots of eating and cooking. I am a massive foodie. I love going to dinner, and food is a big part of travelling for me.”

islandfreshbermuda.com