NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley is thrilled to support the Millrace Kitchen, an incubator space designed to support food business startups. Since opening in 2017, over 40 food businesses have worked out of the kitchen space at 40 South Main Street.
In this series, you’ll Meet the Millrace Members, get a sense of what it takes to start a food business and learn of some incredible food and baked goods being made right in downtown Woonsocket.
Tell us about yourself and your business.
My name is Andy Trockman, founder and head chef of Delivered Dinners! I received my culinary degree in 2007 from the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, but initially received my Bachelor of Science Degree in Business and Marketing from Boston College. During the pandemic, I made the decision to return to my passion of working in the food industry and started my own small business, Delivered Dinners.
I started volunteering part time with Meals On Wheels, helping with local meal deliveries to the elderly. While doing this, I was thinking it would be nice to provide an option, especially to those who were unable or less inclined to eat out, with a delicious home-cooked style meal. I worked with a web-developer to create delivereddinners.com and started asking friends, neighbors, and relatives to sample our meals. Finally, we began trialing our meal preparation and execution at Millrace Kitchen. We started delivering dinners a few times a week, received great feedback, we went live last fall, and since, have been consistently delivering fresh and healthy meals on a weekly basis!
What type of food do you make?
Delivered Dinners offers a variety of homemade meals, always from scratch; our menu is always being updated and very diverse! Our dinner choices range from steak fajitas and giant grilled chicken Caesar salads, to spaghetti and meatballs or meatloaf. Customers are able to place their orders online by noon the day before they’d like it delivered. Our food is always fresh, never frozen, and we only use the best, healthiest ingredients. We prepare the food the same day we deliver it!
How can customers find you?
Please visit us online at our website, our Facebook page or on Instagram! We also just launched our Yelp page.
What are your food business dreams?
It would be nice to expand our delivery area! Right now there are five or six towns we service with our narrow 4:30-6pm delivery window. We deliver to Woonsocket and Cumberland in Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts we deliver to Wrentham, Bellingham, Franklin and Norfolk.
So far, we really appreciate the local small business support. That’s been huge for us. People can go anywhere for food and its so nice that they’re choosing us! Our feedback so far has been very positive including restaurant style meals and huge portions, but with a home-cooked, old family recipe style twist, much better than any fast food. We have been using social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, which has also really helped in promoting our small business. And we just launched our Yelp page, which we’re hoping will continue to be visited by customers to keep up with their feedback. We’re really grateful for all of the support, and hope to continue sharing our small business with our regular customers and with new customers as well!
Interested in starting up your own food business? Need for a baker or caterer for your next event? Looking for a unique space to hold a party?
Visit the Millrace Kitchen to learn more about our offerings.