Making even unhealthy food healthy

WORDS JENNIFER ENNION

With a focus on real food, healthy living and reducing food waste, Marty and Megan Bowden are a Central Coast success story. The couple owns Activate Foods, which supplies locals with fresh, home-style meals via their Erina store or delivery. The company has been steadily growing since starting in 2016 but continues to hold fast to its original ethos.

Activate Foods doesn’t follow a set diet, although you may notice many dishes meet keto and paleo principles. Instead, the focus is on well-balanced healthy choices, with a range of gluten-free, and primarily dairy-free meals. Having been a chef for more than 20 years, Marty creates his menus with balance in mind.

‘Instead of thinking dish by dish having to be exactly fitting a certain style, the entire menu does,’ says Marty. ‘When I look at a menu, I balance out how many different proteins I’ve got, how many varieties of vegetables there are in each dish, and having a variety of high-carb and low-carb.’

Marty and Megan work closely with registered dietitian Nicole Saliba (from Eatsense), who approves the recipes and categorises them as low- or high-carb and if they’re suitable for diabetics. »

© JACS POWELL

A highlight of Marty’s week is heading to Sydney Produce Market, despite having to rise before the sun.

‘I’ve got to the point now where I’ve got relationships with the growers,’ he says. ‘All of the growers and distributors down there know the requirements for each thing that I use.’ And Marty knows exactly where his broccoli, spinach, sweet potato and more come from. He sources ingredients from Central Coast growers occasionally and would like to do more but finds supply too sporadic.

Activate Foods’ customer base has grown year on year, which Marty puts down to locals being more health conscious but also time poor.

‘Because we are home-style cooked, delivered directly to people, they taste the difference,’ he says.

His focus is on making healthy versions of unhealthy favourites such as lasagne and his new dish, barbecue chicken with a homemade barbecue sauce.

Another recent change has been pricing the meals individually, which has given Marty flexibility to use some more premium ingredients.

‘We’ve got an Angus rump steak on the menu now, which I couldn’t have done before because I just could not fit it in the price bracket,’ he says.

There is also a low-carb roasted lamb leg with vegetables and salsa verde. ‘I used to do it when we started but it just got too expensive, whereas now I can put that back on and everyone is loving it.’

For families, there’s a new range, inspired by a desire to cater to his two daughters, aged six and nine, who are often the taste testers.

Marty and Megan take a holistic approach to their business by not only focusing on human health but also the environment. That’s why a large part of their philosophy is keeping food waste down. Every week or two, Marty makes a couple of hundred litres of chicken and beef stock, so that’s where vege off-cuts such as parsley stalks go. Broccoli stalks are trimmed for stir fries, while he often leaves the skins on potatoes. With meat, he works with a local butcher who cuts specifically to Activate Foods’ requirements to fit container sizes, again reducing waste.

In the near future, Marty hopes to move into a warehouse that will allow the company to get a bigger packaging machine and increase distribution. He would also like to branch out to Melbourne or Brisbane markets. However, he has zero desire to sell into supermarkets, understanding that his customers value his fresh, home-delivered approach.

‘I’ve always said to Megan, I’d get as big as I can where I don’t have to compromise the methods that we use and the quality that we have.’