Welcome to Our Table

...without a homemade meal growing up. Our mum, Anne, always used to batch cook, freezing the extra portions in old ice-cream tubs. So, on busy days or when Mum and Dad invited someone who was on their own over for a meal, there was always something to hand. They were so delicious, Ed started to wonder why no-one made ready meals like that. In 1997, he teamed up with his friend Dale, a chef working in catering, and set up a small business with a big dream: to make the best prepared meals on the market and do things differently from the crowd.

...we were just a cobbled-together kitchen in an old pizza delivery building, and a little shop in Farnham called Cakes & Casseroles. Making great frozen meals at scale proved to be much, much harder than we expected, but Dale eventually cracked it, and we opened a second shop. Around this time, we filled a gap in our menu by teaming up with Liz, a talented puddings chef who worked in her home kitchen.

As the team grew, so did the awareness that we didn’t really know how to run a business. With no real admin, accounts, or money, the family stepped in. Ed’s wife Sophie rebranded us as COOK, our sister Rosie joined the team, and our brother James merged the fledgling business with the family bakery.

...was in our sails for the first years of the new millennium, and it seemed like nothing could stop us … until the 2008 financial crisis. It very nearly ended us. We scraped through, just, emerging bruised but stronger and with a greater sense of purpose. his was cemented in 2015, when we co-founded the B Corp movement in the UK, as part of a global movement reinventing business to be a force for good. Every challenge since, including the COVID-19 pandemic, has only reinforced our commitment to building a business that works for people and the planet, not just profit.