About Us
Who We Are
RecipeTin Meals is the not-for-profit division of RecipeTin Eats, a prominent Australian recipe publisher owned and run by Nagi Maehashi.
We cook homemade meals for donation from scratch, 5 days a week, in our dedicated commercial kitchen. There is currently a team of three full-time paid chefs cooking over 500 meals each and every day – that’s 130,000 annually – plus desserts!
Our meals are donated to the vulnerable within the Sydney community via our partner, One Meal. Their organisation manages the distribution of our meals, directing them to those families and individuals who need it most. Recipients also include the displaced and organisations such as shelters for victims of domestic violence.
Delivery to clients is made possible by an incredible network of One Meal volunteers as well as hot meal services provided at dedicated locations across Sydney.
Our kitchen is located in Ryde, 10 km north of the Sydney CBD. The facility is a commercial kitchen designed and outfitted for high volume production, making it ideal for RecipeTin Meals’ purpose. Moving to this kitchen was a hugely exciting milestone for us, laying the foundation for our goal to produce even more meals and assist even more people in need of food support.
Our Story
For Nagi Maehashi, the face and brains behind wildly popular Sydney-based recipe website RecipeTin Eats, cooking, photographing and writing about delicious food all day is par for the course.
Yet the food-obsessed recipe writer is deeply aware there are many people in the world for whom ready access to food of any sort is a luxury – and sometimes out of reach altogether. What many people also don’t realise, she says, is that here in Australia the “Lucky Country” this problem exists right here under our noses too.
Every day four million Australians suffer hunger in some form, including 1 in 5 children. The problem of food insecurity is especially endemic amongst women, Indigenous Australians and remote communities.
“It’s always been my dream to launch a philanthropic initiative one day, to give back to the community and help those in need,” Nagi explains.
“In 2021, during the height of the COVID pandemic when there was greater food insecurity than ever, I established RTM. I just couldn’t sit back and do nothing, because I believe nobody should go hungry in this day and age. I wanted to make a difference, and I felt it made sense to do it in the way I know best: through cooking and food-related work. And so I established my own not-for-profit food charity in my home city of Sydney.”
In August 2021, the RecipeTin Eats team established a small, permanent kitchen facility for food production in Kings Cross. Paid professionals were recruited to staff the kitchen and cook our free meals. RecipeTin Meals was born!
Today RecipeTin Meals is staffed by three full time chefs plus a head chef, and is supported by the wider RecipeTin Eats team. We also moved to a larger kitchen in Ryde, 10 km north of the Sydney CBD and just 5 minutes from the RecipeTin Eats head office. We are currently cooking 500+ meals per day, and recently exceeded an exciting milestone of over a quarter of a million total meals cooked and donated to date.
Our goal is grow our operation further to increase our meal output and spread our reach, enabling us to help even more Australians.
Our partner: One Meal
Early on in our journey, RecipeTin Meals partnered with One Meal, a Sydney-based charity operating since 2014.
One Meal provides a wide variety of food support and other services across Sydney to different communities.
Amongst many other activities, the organisation operates weekly dinner services around Sydney, as well as making direct deliveries of packaged meals to recipients unable to easily attend meal services.
We provide our packaged and other prepared foods to One Meal, who then manage distribution through their established operation. Through the wonderful work One Meal do, our meals reach those in need.
Our great partnership has also unlocked many mutual benefits. For example RecipeTin Meals now receives occasional donated stock and surplus goods from One Meal which goes towards producing even more meals and at lower cost.
About Our Meals
All our meals are nutritious, delicious and produced with the utmost care. We cook from scratch as much as possible with fresh and natural ingredients to ensure the highest quality product.
Our menu changes regularly, and many of the dishes we cook are reader-favourite recipes you’ll find on the RecipeTin Eats website! Here’s a peek at the Top 10 recipes we make at RTM.
We use environmentally-friendly eco-packaging for meals that are fully compostable, with recyclable container lids. All packaging is oven and microwave-safe.
RecipeTin Meals is currently producing at least 2,500 meals a week, plus desserts. Most of our meals are packed in containers which can be enjoyed freshly made or frozen and enjoyed at a later time.
On weekends, some of our meals are served hot to patrons at One Meal food service sites around Sydney.
