• by Steve Ellwanger , June 16, 2020

Not all companies are like Facebook and Google in their ability to give employees perks in the form of in-office meals.

Freshly wants to change that—along with extending the offering to employees working from home—with the new Freshly For Business service.

For several years, the company has been offering consumers in the lower 48 states a subscription service for non-frozen, home-delivered meals. After the onset of COVID-19, Freshly decided to accelerate the launch of Freshly For Business, originally planned for later this year.

Freshly has already partnered with PwC, KPMG and other large firms.

Frehsly's original B2B concept was based on helping companies provide the commissary eating style their employees desired.

“They really wanted variety for their employees. If they ordered a commissary kind of buffet style, some people were happy and some people were not,” Freshly founder and CEO Michael Wystrach tells Marketing Daily.

Freshly’s subscription is a “no commitment” one, since orders can be paused or canceled at will. Companies that sign up for its B2B service can fully or partially pay for their employees’ meals at work or home.

Accelerating the B2B launch “is really helping business provide healthy lunches to their employees in this distributed, work-from-home environment,” says Wystrach.

“We’re all on back-to-back Zoom calls and it feels like we’re busier than ever. The problem is that lunch is kind of harder for everyone to get now.”

Wystrach  credits word-of-mouth advertising for generating corporate awareness of Freshly’s existence.

“Almost all of our principal business customers came to us. Either their employees were using us, or they found us on a Google search. We haven’t had to market or spend really any money on marketing so far.”

Freshly says it delivered 4.2 million meals in March and is nearing one million per week—up from 600,000 last August.

The pandemic also has boosted subscription services for global meal kit market leader HelloFresh. The company says it fulfilled 8.95 million orders to U.S. customers in the first quarter of 2020—up 82.2% from the first quarter of 2019—and delivered 61.3 million meals.