Lincoln entrepreneur makes home-cooked food in a jar

By Maureen Belt

After nearly 25 years of putting her registered dietitian and nutritionist credentials to work for others — most recently at a nursing home — Lincoln resident Jodi Gorman sprung out on her own. In 2020, she opened Happy Jars, a delivery service for healthy and flavorful small-batch homemade soups and salads.

Gorman’s business plan involved sourcing the finest and freshest ingredients, tweaking family recipes, creating new ones, and ladling or layering the finished creations into tall clear jars to be delivered to customers (though they now can be picked up at the Codman Farm store as well).

Startups require jumping through lots of hoops. There was acquiring a catering license, registering as an LLC, and strict health codes to follow that govern everything from purchasing ingredients to sterilizing cooking tools and logging temperatures. Gorman needed to rent an industrial kitchen to comply with those codes, so she he called around and eventually found a fit at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church in Acton. The venue even offered bonus storage space.

Gorman culled recipes passed down in her family as well as other tried-and-true favorites she’s created over the years. Using as many local and organic ingredients as the season would allow, she began tweaking them for commercial success. Her husband Evan and their two school-aged daughters, Sage and Isa, served as testers, offering feedback like “extra cilantro” and “more parsley.” Neighbor and confidant Sabra Alden chimed in with ideas for bumping up protein and other nutrients.

Once the testers’ high standards were met, Gorman relied on her extensive dietary background and completed the tedious work of precisely itemizing not just ingredients but also the nutritional values and calorie count of every soup and salad. Then there needed to be a website where customers could order and pay for the specials of the week. Another Lincolnite, and graphic artist Linda Cordner, designed the site and maintains it.

Of course, as Gorman was busy doing all this in late 2019, having no idea a global pandemic was brewing.

“We were totally prepared and ready to go the day before everything shut down,” she said at the end of a long day of cooking batches of lentil soup. One added hitch: Mason jars were scarce during the height of the pandemic — problematic for a company called Happy Jars. Opening day moved from March 2020 to July. As it turned out, the timing worked out well for a gourmet home delivery business to enter the market.

“Most people were working from home,” Gorman noted, while many others were avoiding restaurants and limiting trips to grocery stores. It’s a good business to be in. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, food delivery has become a global market worth more than $150 billion since 2017. The bulk of that increase came during the pandemic, the report stated, adding the market can expect an 8 percent growth going forward. As for Happy Jars, it has yet to yield much profit, but repeat customers and word-of-mouth referrals are leading to an encouraging bottom line.

Alden is the kind of friend who walked dogs with Gorman in the predawn hours while Gorman debated risking a career with full benefits for the uncertainty of owning her own business. “She talked a lot about doing this for so long — for years,” said Alden, who was elbow-deep in a sudsy pot in the sink.

Besides being a supportive listener and go-to pot scrubber, Alden talks to farmers about produce availability. She picks chicken off bones, sanitizes jars and counters, sweeps floors and inspects lettuce leaves individually. “We triple wash it,” she said, “and the romaine — literally we wash every leaf.”

Each week Gorman makes two soups and salads from her growing recipe collection. Customers log into her website by Sunday night to place their orders from a menu that includes all sorts of soup and salads with memorable names like Uplifting Udon, California Dreaming, Why Not Waldorf, and Sunshine on a Cloudy Day. She can usually accommodate vegan and gluten-free customers as well as special requests. One person asked for no salt in the turkey chili and brown rice soup, so Gorman simply separated that portion from the batch and omitted the salt.

She sources local ingredients whenever possible. For example, she makes croutons from bread purchased at Nashoba Brook Bakery, a slow-rise artisan bakery in West Concord.

“A lot of kids eat my food, and their parents just have peace of mind,” Gorman said. To accommodate children, Happy Jars offers 16-ounce containers that fit neatly into lunch boxes. With the emphasis on protein and nutritious contents, most of her soups and salads are complete meals.

Small soup batches are prepared every Monday and packed on Tuesday after properly cooling and setting. Salads can’t be made that far ahead. “The red cabbage gets brown overnight, Gorman said.” Another Lincoln friend, Terry Kay, helps with Tuesday deliveries in Lincoln and surrounding communities. Delivery fees are based on the size of the order. Heating instructions are included, and contents are good for one week from the day they were prepared. Customers may also pick up their orders — a trend that’s growing since she had to raise delivery rates. And now they’re available to buy in the Codman Farm store as well.

Nearly three years into being an entrepreneur, Gorman is still having fun and looking forward. “I love that I am my own boss and that I make my own hours, and that really goes well with motherhood,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do something else and I was ready. I love to cook, and I really love to feed people, and I love to feed people really good food.”

You can follow Happy Jars on Instagram here.