After nearly 3 years of careful planning, God’s Love We Deliver recently converted all client meals to a new “chilled and frozen” model. This new plan delivers our freshly prepared meal components either frozen or stored safely below 40 degrees, ready for reheating.

Before making the change, God’s Love surveyed all clients and the results were clear – clients actually prefer chilled and frozen meals.

“Our hot meal service was part of our history, and delivering a hot meal to someone just feels good. But when I heard from clients about how they like to heat their meals and eat on their own schedule, rather than right away, it all made sense.” says Dorella Walters, Senior Director of Programs.

Each week, God’s Love cooks and delivers more than 20,000 nutritious individually tailored meals to people living with severe illness. Illness affects many aspects of a person’s life, including appetite. For our clients who are sick, they may not want to eat, on the day of their delivery, that which is delivered that day. Therefore, our new chilled/frozen model better accommodates the needs of our clients who can choose what they will most like to eat that day.

Previously, only 25 percent of meal delivery routes were designated “chilled/frozen.” With expanded freezers and refrigerators at our Brooklyn location, the God’s Love team was able to fulfill a longstanding goal of converting all meal preparation to this model. The chilled/frozen model not only allows clients greater flexibility in what and when they eat, it also offers great improvement from a food safety standpoint.

Lisa Zullig, Director of Nutrition Services, said, “Food safety is always a top priority. We’re feeding more people, and that meant that our drivers were sitting in traffic with a lot of hot meals. Chilled and frozen helps eliminate that concern.”

The ultimate goal at God’s Love is to continuously strive to improve what we do for our clients. “We’ll always listen to clients and find out what’s best for them,” Walters says.