My Fit Foods received U.S. Department of Agriculture certification Monday for its new 30,000-square-foot central kitchen in Dallas-Fort Worth, and the company is looking to expand its reach into retail outlets beyond its own units.
“It’s really a game-changer in the space,” David Goronkin, CEO of Austin, Texas-based My Fit Foods, told Nation’s Restaurant News. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for use to get our product to our consumers where and when they want it.”
My Fit Foods, which has 52 locations in five states, serves a range of packaged healthful meals, most in two sizes, and offers meal-planning advice. “Until we had the USDA certification, we did not have the ability to sell through other retailers,” he noted.
USDA certification means the facility meets food-safety standards for processing or manufacturing, packaging and holding food for human consumption.
The new central kitchen will allow the company to expand into other retail markets, Goronkin said.
“It allows us the opportunity to sell our menu offerings through new and strategic distribution channels such as corporate cafeterias, airports, micro-markets, just to name a few, as well as other third-party retailers,” Goronkin said.
The new facility is located southwest of the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport.
“Dallas is very central,” Goronkin said. “We have a strong concentration of stores throughout Texas,” The company has 52 locations total, with 38 units in Texas and two outlets in Oklahoma. Other units are in Arizona, California and Illinois, with kitchen facilities in each state, Goronkin said.
Beyond the centralized distribution in Texas, Goronkin said the new My Fit Foods kitchen “assures that every product is consistent, fresh and delicious.” The kitchen has the capacity to service as many as 180 My Fit Foods locations, he added.
The facility includes what Goronkin called “extensive hot and cold-food preparation areas,” as well as three assembly lines for meal preparation, he said. The kitchen also added large cold storage and warehouse space.
Goronkin said bestsellers on the My Fit Foods menu range from turkey, enchiladas, tacos, salads and chili. “At any given time, given the medium and large sizes, there are upwards of 120 different options on the freshly prepared side,” he said. “We also have a wide selection of grab-and-go snack items and beverages.”
My Fit Foods recently partnered with the Healthy Dining nutritional analysis service. Goronkin said all of My Fit Foods items, as of last week, are certified to meet Healthy Dining’s criteria. “You can come in and pick anything you want and not be worried about the saturated fat, sodium and those sorts of things,” he said.
Goronkin added that the company is tapping into the consumers “who are looking for options outside traditional QSR that give them great flavor, they can take it with them and they don’t have to think about calories, fats, sodium and 100 percent of the products in our stores are gluten-free.”
In July, Marlin Equity Partners joined existing My Fit Foods investor TSG Consumer Partners to speed development of the concept.
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