Our Mission
To inspire conscious cooking.While our work is centered around the kitchen, we also focus on our impact outside of it. We want everyone to be aware of the ingredients they choose and the impact their meals have on our environment. With growing awareness about sustainable products and supporting local food growers, more people will effectively give back to our earth and communities. This is Simply, Good for our future.
Our Story
There's no memory like that tied to quality meals. Gathering with friends and family for good food and good times creates lifelong happiness. We set out to give families this experience every day by making dinner time easy. It's simply, good.
We knew becoming parents would change things, we just didn’t know completely how. Time really disappears when you’re raising children, and finding places to save time is essential to balancing everything.
We could decide two things as true: new parents need to eat and new parents are tired. Early in pregnancy, Lyssa and Nick decided to create freezer meals to have on hand to ease the transition from childless. The night before our first daughter was born, we popped the final meal in the last spot of our upright freezer.
Those meals saved us for the next months, and the day we popped the last one into our oven offered a bitter sweet realization: if we wanted home cooked food, we’d have to do all the work from here out.
That was 2014. We spent the next years learning about, creating and implementing different meal prep systems because … it’s just the only way we can possibly manage getting real food on the table, with now two little kids! Relish and Roots is about helping others access this simply good food with ease.
Three days after becoming parents, we learned that Lyssa’s then 3-year-old nephew had stage 4 Neuroblastoma. Cancer. That fueled a mission to start a nonprofit, Positive Every Day Cancer Foundation, with a similar mission: to enable WI families with a child battling cancer to spend more time together. One way? Through pre-made monthly meal kits.
Rhonda, a family member, was seeking to share her love of food with others and had a desire to further support the PED Foundation. A conversation was had and Relish and Roots was created.
Relish and Roots is an important tool for all of us to contribute to the Positive Every Day Cancer Foundationwhile also helping other families in the process to make dinner simply, good.
SIMPLIFY EATING
The Food Crew
Rhonda Mesko
Founder, Kitchen + Meal Prep
Happiness is rooted in family and food. Rhonda is a true leader, motivated to build up others and share her love of healthful food and life’s simple joys.
Nicholas Schmidt
Founder, Kitchen + Meal Prep
There will never be enough tools of the trade for this guy. Nick combines an inherent desire to learn with a love of flavor and quality to create unforgettable meals.
Lyssa Schmidt
Founder, Communications + Kitchen Help
If there’s a story about food, she wants to hear it. Lyssa combines a passion for writing with a sense of exploration in cultivating Relish+Roots relationships.