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Wall Street Journal

A Rare Disease Won’t Keep This Mountain Man Off the Trails

Published Dec 17, 2018

He and his wife have a Sun Basket membership. The meal-delivery service ships ingredients and recipes that they prepare for dinner. Frequent meals include rainbow trout with a vegetable stir fry or salmon with sautéed kale. Mr. LeNail also enjoys cooking soups and quiches. His weakness is goat cheese.

Forbes

If Food Is Medicine, Then Sun Basket Wants To Be The Prescription

Published Dec 15, 2018

When he founded Sun Basket, Zbar, who’s the son of a cancer researcher, “focused on healthy lifestyles, like ‘I want to eat Paleo, I want to eat gluten-free.’ For us there was no such thing as a bad healthy lifestyle as long as the actual nutrients in the food were healthy. But then the next thing we started thinking about was how can we approach more than just lifestyles, but health states...we did partnerships with The American Heart Association, The American Diabetes Association and the American Cancer Society.”

That wasn’t enough for Zbar. He wondered if Sun Basket could impact more people’s lives. So, he asked the dietitians on his team who they respected most in their field. Pretty soon, he and Dr. David Katz of Yale University, The American College of Lifestyle Medicine and The True Health Initiative met and hit it off. The rest might be history.

Self

21 Subscription Boxes That'll Make Your Life a Million Times Easier

Published Nov 02, 2018

"Why we’re into it: I tried Sun Basket one time, and that’s all it took to get me totally hooked. The produce in each shipment is organic, the meat is antibiotic-free, and the seafood is wild-caught and sustainable, which is right up my alley. (All deliveries arrive in packaging that's 100 percent recyclable and compostable, too.) The meal kit delivery service offers a wide variety of meal plan options, including paleo, vegan, vegetarian, and pescatarian. Offerings range from classics like chicken milanese and bucatini carbonara, to fun new combinations like farro risotto and roasted shrimp with ajo blanco sauce. Price varies depending on which meal plan you choose—either classic or family style-sized servings—as well as the number of weekly recipes sent (up to four per week under the family style plan), or number of people being served (either two or four under the classic plan)."

Reviewed

The Best Meal Kit Delivery Services of 2018

Published Oct 19, 2018

"Best for Vegetarians

While not an entirely vegetarian service, Sun Basket offers a huge variety of quick, flavorful plant-based meals that will satisfy vegetarians and omnivores alike. Their ingredients are largely organic, and their recipes are some of the fastest we tested."

Wall Street Journal

The Messy Business of Selling Meal Kits

Published Aug 16, 2018

“Building a perishable-food business is not something you do quickly or lightly,’ said Don Barnett, Sun Basket Inc.’s chief operating officer, who began his career at Dole Food Co. and has 25 years of experience with perishable food, including roles as a cofounder and CFO at organicgirl, a packaged salad company.

To help keep a lid on costs, Sun Basket, whose meal kits target health-conscious consumers, has gone so far as to set up a Midwestern distribution center in a converted limestone cave—a cheaper way to keep its products cold than spending millions to convert a conventional warehouse in the region for refrigeration. The temperature inside the underground facility remains stable regardless of whether it’s hot or cold outside, so the company spends less on electricity.”

Cheddar

Why Sun Basket Is Going After the Healthy Lifestyle Market

Published May 22, 2018

“The meal-kit delivery service specializes in specific diets from Paleo to gluten-free to Mediterranean, which is how it differentiates itself in the space. “We’re not trying to be all things to all people,” says CEO Adam Zbar.”

Forbes

A Meal Subscription Box That’s Seasonal And Earth Friendly

Published Apr 22, 2018

“There’s really nothing like a delicious cooked meal in the comfort of our own home after a long exhaustive day at work. This is where a meal delivery service comes into play. Having healthy, organic ingredients delivered right to your door can save you time and help pave the way for a more healthy lifestyle. Sun Basket, a meal delivery company that delivers dietitian-approved meal plans that offer organic, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian and Paleo, aims to make your cooking easier and healthier.”

Reader’s Digest

I Tried Every Popular Meal Kit Delivery Service—and This Is the Best One

Published Apr 22, 2018

“Sun Basket has definitely taken the meal kit game up a notch. The company has made the most concessions for people who are serious about healthy eating and has the most choices for different types of diets. For example, while I try to stick to a Paleo/Whole30 lifestyle for 90 percent of the week, I wasn’t always able to do that on many of the other meal kits. However, with Sun Basket, not only was I able to stick to my eating regimen, but I also I enjoyed some pretty great meals too, including a poached salmon salad with tahini goddess dressing and lettuce-wrapped turkey sliders.”

Cheddar

Healthy Cooking Made Easy

Published Apr 19, 2018

“There is a lot of money to be made in the meal-kit business. Adam Zbar, CEO of Sun Basket, explains how he is disrupting the grocery industry.”

CNBC

Meal kit company Sun Basket bought a cave, and it’s helping them beat Blue Apron

Published Mar 29, 2018

“You see, Sun Basket owns a cave — and it saves the company thousands of dollars in utilities every month.

The San Francisco-based company is well aware that the meal kit industry’s sustainability has come into question in the last year, but it’s not too worried. While other companies such as Blue Apron have suffered from distribution issues, Sun Basket’s facilities are running smoothly and growing bigger.”

Cooking Light

Sun Basket Launches Heart-Healthy Meal Delivery Service

Published Oct 11, 2017

“Sun Basket is the first meal kit service to obtain the American Heart Association’s Heart-Check certification…recipes in the [Lean & Clean Meal Plan] have undergone meticulous evaluation to ensure they abide by the AHA’s strict nutrition guidelines.”

PC Mag

Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service

Published Mar 07, 2017

“Sun Basket offers some of the most delicious food we’ve encountered in our meal-kit-delivery-service reviewing, and the packaging is sensible and mostly recyclable, which isn’t the case with most competing services.”

Parade

5 Ways to Add Some Zen to Your Life

Published Jan 27, 2017

“[Sun Basket’s] food was packaged beautifully in individual brown paper bags, everything came out delicious and was ridiculously easy to prepare.”

OBSERVER

We Tried Meal Kits That Are Supposedly Healthier Than Blue Apron – Here’s How They Rank We have a new meal kit champion

Published Dec 16, 2016

“Sun Basket wins because the food is just that good. I actually gave it a higher rating than Peach Dish, the winner of my first article testing and comparing meal kits. They’re priced about the same, as well. But Sun Basket was simply the most delicious, and I really appreciate how often it deviated from dishes like pasta and meat-with-a-veggie, which seem to be staples of the subscription meal service industry.”

Inc.

Williams-Sonoma Enters Meal-Kit Market

Published Nov 01, 2016

“For the two San Francisco Bay Area companies the marriage of their brands seemed like a natural match. ‘We saw it as a great partnerships with both of us focused on making cooking easy and delicious and promoting the Northern California value system,’ said Adam Zbar, CEO, Sun Basket.”

Business Insider

An unlikely company is building a Blue Apron killer in the $5 billion battle for your dinner

Published Nov 01, 2016

“Williams-Sonoma is getting into the meal-kit business.

The cookware company is partnering with San Francisco startup Sun Basket to offer organic, non-GMO meal kits bundled with Williams-Sonoma kitchen tools.

‘It’s a really exciting partnership for us,’ [said Sun Basket CEO Adam Zbar] in an interview with Business Insider. ‘It helps elevate our brand and take it to a national audience.’”

Eater

Williams-Sonoma Hops on the Meal Kit Bandwagon

Published Nov 01, 2016

Published Nov 1, 2016

“Williams-Sonoma — the high-end kitchen-supply store — is the latest company to start slinging boxes of pre-measured and packaged raw foods ready for cooking. The company has announced a partnership with Sun Basket, a company that specializes in organic and non-GMO meal kits, on a line of co-branded boxed kits.”

San Francisco Magazine

Everything but the Bird

Published Nov 01, 2016

“There are very few things that can improve upon perfectly roasted brussels sprouts, particularly when the outer leaves are crunchy and golden brown. But Sun Basket chef Justine Kelly has done them one better with the addition of hazelnuts, currants, and roasted delicata squash.”

“And while you have to put the (completely organic) dish together yourself, Sun Basket makes it easy.”

Tasting Table

The 5 Best Ways to Get Healthy Food Delivered

Published Oct 03, 2016

“Using 100-percent recycled products is a huge plus, considering how much waste these services can accumulate. Sun Basket is also the first kit to offer a breakfast option and lets you swap a dinner for two morning meals. Fingers crossed other services follow suit with this idea.”

Tasting Table

100 Percent Recyclable Meal Kit Packaging Is Here

Published Aug 03, 2016

“When Sun Basket’s head of user experience, Tyler MacNiven, found out that ‘90 percent of Sun Basket’s packaging was not being returned and was ending up in a landfill,’ he knew he had to do something about it. The company wanted to offer an easy way for customers to recycle and compost the products at home without sacrificing freshness and quality of food.”

Inc.

Sun Basket Raises $15M Up Round as Overall Food Delivery Market Cools

Published Jul 26, 2016

“We started this [Sun Basket] focusing on meal-kits and how we provide an easier more delicious solution,” said Adam Zbar, founder and CEO, Sun Basket. “What we have realized is that we have a built a pretty radical solution in terms of how to create a better more efficient way to bring organic food to people in the U.S.”

San Jose’s Office of Economic Development (OED)

Sun Basket—The Newest Addition to San Jose’s On-Demand Economy Creates Jobs

Published Jun 27, 2016

“You may be wondering how these on-demand services are shaping our local economy. San Jose’s newest addition, Sun Basket, has created 225 new full-time jobs with full benefits, and is on track to grow to 300 jobs in the near term. Sun Basket is an e-commerce meal kit subscription service that delivers chef-created recipes with pre- proportioned fresh ingredients to their online subscribers.”

NPR

Do Meal Kits Provide Great Taste Along With Convenience?

Published Jun 02, 2016

“I tried the Salmon in Chraime with Mint couscous and really loved the vibrant flavors. The fish was Wild Alaskan salmon and the sauce was made from pureed tomatoes with a touch of spice, couscous with fresh mint, and a lemon-spiked yogurt sauce with dried sumac sprinkled on top. It was incredibly fresh tasting Moroccan-style food, and introduced me to some new flavor profiles. I was impressed with the quality of the fish and all the ingredients.” - Kathy Gunst (NPR’s Here & Now) 

Listen to the audio review here!

BuzzFeed

10 Life-Changing Things To Try in April

Published Apr 04, 2016

“To save time, I’ve been trying out meal-in-a-box kits (or what a colleague of mine calls “Lego recipes”). There are a ton of options (Blue Apron, Plated, Purple Carrot, and HelloFresh, to name a few), and most of them suffer the same pitfall: insane amounts of packaging, which makes my Earth-loving heart hurt.My favorite box so far is Sun Basket because a) it comes with a return label for you to ship back the box, ice packs, and insulation for reuse; b) it’s an SF-based company that sources produce from West Coast farms (the others are based in NY); and c) the veggie recipes are actually filling, healthy, and INSANELY good.”

The New York Times

It’s Dinner in a Box. But Are Meal Delivery Kits Cooking?

Published Apr 04, 2016

“Devotees of the culinary sensibilities of Northern California can join Sun Basket, where one of its owners, Justine Kelly, the former chef de cuisine at Charles Phan’s Slanted Door in San Francisco, develops the recipes.

She wrote 450 recipes last year, and each month sends out about 150,000 meals like lemongrass- and coriander-crusted pork loin and coconut-almond breakfast smoothies. The price works out to about $11.49 a meal, which she admitted makes it a luxury item for some. But Ms. Kelly said she has friends who aren’t wealthy who use it because the time-cost ratio works in their favor. “Honestly, especially in the Bay Area, it can be cheaper to do a meal kit than shop,” she said.”

POPSUGAR.

10 Food Delivery Services For Every Personality

Published Feb 10, 2016

“For Farm-to-Table Fanatics // Strengths: Offering Paleo, gluten-free, and/or vegetarian options, Sun Basket prides itself on using the freshest, non-GMO produce, sustainably sourced seafood, and pastured meats. The quality of the ingredients truly impressed us! Better yet, the recipes are incredibly flavorful even though they only take 30 minutes. To top it all off, the box comes with a return delivery sticker, so all of the packaging can be returned to the company via USPS. Hooray for offsetting waste!”

San Francisco Chronicle

Six healthy meal-delivery services in the Bay Area

Published Feb 01, 2016

“Another meal kit, this one from former Slanted Door chef Justine Kelly. A few great things about this one: You can customize your meals, first within a category (Paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian, etc.) and then the actual meals. You don’t just get what you get, as is the case with many other meal kits. I opted for baked eggs with tomatoes and pistou, turkey sausage with beet apple salad and walnut vinaigrette, and shrimp with blood orange-jicama salad with salsa verde. “Clean” or not, this is the kind of food I want to be eating. Also great: Each meal’s ingredients come in a paper bag, so there aren’t a million ingredients and individual bags, meaning there’s less waste. And there’s a paid shipping label so you can send back all of the ridiculous packaging that keeps everything fresh and cold. Overall, at $11.50/serving, it’s a winner — possibly my favorite so far of the meal kits I’ve tried. www.sunbasket.com”

Inc.

How Losing 50 Pounds Inspired This Entrepreneur to Start a Successful Startup

Published Jan 22, 2016

“'Do you want your 40’s to be good or bad?' Adam Zbar’s doctor asked pointedly. These words pierced his heart when the doctor told him that all his blood pressure and heart rate were going in the wrong direction. He had just sold his first company, Tap11, to the founders of YouTube. Zbar should be celebrating life instead of fearing it. He had a simple choice to alter the trajectory of his life–change his diet.”

Today.com

6 healthy food trends for 2016

Published Jan 06, 2016

“People want to cook fun and delicious meals at home, but many don’t want to spend time searching for recipes and shopping for ingredients. Thanks to this, meal kit services like Blue Apron and Plated saw huge growth last year and 2016 will see it continue to expand. Look for new services that offer solutions for every type of diet, including vegan and paleo, and cater to millennial tastes. New delivery services include the Mark Bittman-curated Purple Carrot, Hello Fresh, One Potato, Sun Basket and Peach Dish, offering Southern-inspired dishes. Phil Lempert, the guru of food predictions, says that 2016 will bring celeb chef-driven meal kits and we’ll see some brands consolidate to create the Amazon of meal kits.”

CNBC

Published Dec 04, 2015

"If you’re a busy professional, if you’re a busy working mom, busy working dad, busy couple, it’s just the type of thing where you can have the experience where we’re almost like a farmers market in the sky, curated by a great chef,” said Adam Zbar, CEO of meal kit delivery company, Sun Basket."

Inc.

Sun Basket Gobbles Up $4.5MM in Funding

Published Sep 17, 2015

“Founded by Adam Zbar and Justine Kelly, the former head chef of the James Beard Award-winning restaurant, Slanted Door, Sun Basket began with the mission to bring Northern California’s healthy food sensibilities to the rest of the country via easy-to-prepare recipes and sustainably sourced, organic ingredients… “We really want this to be something that is easy and enjoyable,” said Zbar. “The beauty of doing farm-to-table is less ingredients is more, and it really focuses on the flavor profile of each one of those ingredients.”

Wall Street Journal

Workout Buddies and Work Colleagues

Published Aug 03, 2015

Learn how Sun Basket CEO Adam Zbar stays healthy and keeps the spirt of competition alive in the office. Fun fact: The name Sun Basket was inspired by Adam and Tyler’s early-morning “Sun Runs”!

“Last fall Mr. Zbar and Sun Basket’s head of branding and user experience, Tyler MacNiven, began Friday sunrise workouts. Mr. MacNiven, 35, won the TV show “The Amazing Race” in 2006. [They] meet at the Miwok trailhead in the Marin Headlands at 5 a.m. with the goal of reaching the top just as the sun is rising… Mr. Zbar and his fiancée cook Sun Basket meals three times a week. They subscribe to Sun Basket’s Paleo meal plan… Portion control and smarter food choices have led Mr. Zbar to drop to 177 pounds.”

Food Gal - Carolyn Jung

Test Driving (and Cooking) Sun Basket

Published Jun 26, 2015

“When I was invited to try out a free delivery by San Francisco’s Sun Basket, I was swayed to do so by a couple of factors.

First, the recipes for the cooking kits were developed by Justine Kelly, former executive chef at The Slanted Door in San Francisco. Second, the quality of ingredients is impressive. The kits include organic, seasonal ingredients from highly regarded purveyors such as Dirty Girl, Far West Funghi, Water 2 Table, and Marin Sun.”