Stepping up to the plate

Pandemic demand fuels further growth for Ankeny-based Mom’s Meals

 Every day across much of the United States, Purfoods LLC, which does business as Mom’s Meals, is delivering tens of thousands of ready-to-heat refrigerated meals to seniors and other clients who may not otherwise have access to nutritious food options.

Much of the operating structure behind the family-owned Ankeny company is based in Iowa, and the fast-growing business is putting its foot on the gas as the continuing pandemic drives demand. Mom’s Meals plans to increase its Iowa workforce by several hundred workers by the end of this year.

The 20-year-old company has grown into a coast-to-coast enterprise that employs more than 2,000 workers across a growing network of facilities around the country. The company currently delivers more than 1 million meals per week.

“We’ve got great tailwinds around our core products of post-discharge programs for people leaving the hospital and needing meals to recuperate, and our chronic condition management programs for diabetes, renal disease and heart disease,” said Mike Anderson, CEO. “These nutritious, quality meals are being delivered to people’s homes throughout the pandemic. That obviously created a spike in our business, because people need to remain in their homes.”

Mom’s Meals sales grew by about 50% year-over-year in 2020, up from the 25% to 30% annual growth it has experienced in recent years, he said. Mom’s Meals is on track to add about 600 more employees nationally to its workforce by the end of the year, with several hundred of those new positions slated for Iowa. By year-end, the company’s U.S. workforce is expected to reach about 2,750 employees.

Post-discharge meal programs for hospital patients have been a significant growth area. Among new clients signed by Mom’s Meals in 2020 was the health insurance giant Humana.

“Humana, along with some other major players, have continued to adopt home-delivered meal programs and expand them to other populations beyond what they might have started with,” Anderson said. That expansion has been due to the positive outcomes that providers have seen with patients, along with customer satisfaction that members report. “Our partners love the work that we’re doing, and we’re just continuing to build on a lot of the same relationships, but just more broadly across their organizations,” he said.

In late 2019, the company was delivering about 700,000 meals per week nationally. “We’re now delivering well over 1 million a week at this point. So we were able to help a lot of people and grow our business in a time that was obviously a very difficult operating environment,” Anderson said.

The pandemic is shining an even brighter light on food insecurity, Anderson said.

“We have had a lot of our health care partners, as well as new partners, coming to us and saying, “We’ve got this population [that could benefit from meals delivered to the home]. So we were able to step up to the plate and really help a lot of people in that form and fashion.”

Part of the growth is coming from greater flexibility being provided to patients in how they can pay for health-related expenses. Many of Mom’s Meals partnering health plans are now issuing OTC (over the counter) cards to patients that can be spent on medication, transportation or groceries. “We’ve partnered with the different platforms that provide these services to our health plan partners, and so we’re really starting to see those cards used to have meals delivered to the home,” he said.

In addition to health care organizations, there has also been growth through partnerships with social services agencies.

“We work with a lot of area agencies on aging throughout the United States; they’ll help coordinate benefits for Medicaid plans and other types of government-funded programs. But with the pandemic came different funding streams for helping people manage food insecurity. … We had a lot of groups that looked to us as a valuable partner and we were able to build a relationship with them through our ability to deliver meals nationwide.”

The past year has been a difficult operating environment, Anderson acknowledged, with the heavy responsibility of knowing that vulnerable populations are depending on their products and services on a daily basis while maintaining safety protocols. “It’s been a tough year, but the team has really rallied.”

Where the growth is occurring

Last year, Mom’s Meals completed a 30,000-square-foot addition to its fulfillment center in Ankeny, with a $3.5 million investment in added refrigerated space.

On the heels of that expansion, the company began a further expansion of the headquarters complex in Ankeny last fall, with an additional 22,500-square-foot glass-cube structure that can accommodate another 275 employees. The Ankeny headquarters building as of last fall had 544 people working there.

Additionally, its south Des Moines office, which it completed in late 2019, now has about 220 employees assigned to it, with a physical capacity for 350, although many have been working remotely through the pandemic.

Other expansion projects underway include:

Expansion of its North Jackson, Ohio, distribution center – a 110,000-square-foot addition to the existing 75,000-square-foot distribution center, expected to be completed by September.

Construction nearing completion of a 75,000-square-foot distribution center in Conyers, Ga., that will employ about 125 people.

Groundbreaking recently in Oklahoma City for the company’s third USDA-certified kitchen, a 200,000-square-foot facility scheduled to be completed in December.

Whereas Mom’s Meals’ Iowa kitchen facilities — one in Ankeny and the other in Grinnell — were expansions of existing buildings to meet increased production needs, the new Oklahoma City kitchen is a greenfield project that will primarily serve Western and Southern states, Anderson said.

“So this was the first time we’ve been able to step back and say, what does a perfect footprint look like? How can we put together a great product flow and great workflow in the building and continue to expand?”

All of the facility growth will mean a much bigger head count by the end of this year. As of last fall, Mom’s Meals employed more than 1,900 workers nationwide, and that number should grow by between 500 and 1,000 additional hires by year-end 2021, Anderson said.

Survey: Importance of home-delivered meals increases during pandemic

Mom’s Meals recently conducted a survey of more than 2,000 Medicare and Medicaid participants that found that a home-delivered meal benefit is more important than ever in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was an update to a study the company had conducted in 2017.

Among the findings:

• A majority of Medicaid respondents (53%) thought home-delivered meals were “more important” or “much more important” than they were prior to the pandemic.

• 62% of Medicaid respondents indicated they were “interested” or “very interested” in having their health plan provide home-delivered meals.

• Just over half of Medicare respondents were “interested” or “very interested” in having their health plan provide home-delivered meals, and people who lived alone or identified as “non-white” were more likely to be interested.

Link to the survey: bit.ly/3v7SoPV