What if health plans could cover in-home chef services to improve patient outcomes? In this episode, James Maskell sits down with Renata Jenik, founder of MyFoodom.com, to explore how her company is pioneering a powerful new model of food as medicine—one that’s already being covered by insurance.
Renata shares her personal journey from overwhelmed working mom struggling with PCOS and insulin resistance to entrepreneur with a mission to redefine healthcare through culinary empowerment. What started as a personal solution—hiring a chef to prepare healthy meals for her family—evolved into a scalable program now contracted by health plans like Anthem to serve Medicaid patients in Sacramento County.
Unlike traditional meal delivery, MyFoodom sends trained chefs into patients’ homes every two weeks to cook nourishing meals and teach basic culinary skills. It’s a powerful model rooted in sustainability and empowerment.
Tune in to learn about:
- How a personal health crisis sparked a revolutionary business idea
- Why health plans like Anthem are paying for in-home chef services
- The key differences between meal delivery and chef-led culinary education
- The challenges and solutions of scaling food-as-medicine at the community level
- Why El Dorado County is emerging as a hub for healthspan innovation
- And so much more!
If you’re interested in the intersection of culinary care, health equity, and scalable functional medicine delivery, this is a must-listen.
James Maskell:
This is The Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’m your host, James Maskell, and we’ll see you next time. Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we are talking about putting a chef into the homes of people who need food as medicine. That is a cool concept. That is the evolution of medicine, my friends. And the coolest thing about this is that I met this woman who is doing this right now at Healthy El Dorado. She came along and we met through the process and she came to the VIP dinner and we connected. And I saw that there were in fact, people in my county doing the most interesting things, who I never knew. And if that’s not a reason to get involved and to build locally, I don’t know what is. Thank you so much for tuning in. In this episode, you’re going to learn about food. You’re going to learn about Renata’s journey to create food, and you’re going to learn how insurance companies, including Medi-Cal in California, are paying for food as medicine with a chef inside someone’s home. This is amazing. Enjoy.
So a warm welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Welcome, Renata Jenik. Welcome, Renata.
Renata Jenik:
Thank you very much. Hi, thank you for having me.
James Maskell:
I’m excited to connect. And this is actually, this podcast recording is coming a couple of weeks after the first healthy El Dodo, and that was the first time we met in person. And it sounds like you actually quite familiar with my wife ahead of that as well. Right? Tell me about that.
Renata Jenik:
Oh gosh. I love your wife, love your wife and her business and what she’s doing with the business. I use it a lot Relove. I believe in living in a clean and recycle as much as possible, and I love her concept of helping us reduce waste in the most wasteful industry, which is the fashion industry. I just love what she’s doing and she has such good taste.
James Maskell:
Wonderful. Well, thank you for saying that. And it’s interesting that you two were already very acquainted. Well look for years. Yeah. So here we go. Ultimately, I’d like to start actually by asking you about a post that you did on LinkedIn the other day, and it was you holding a check and you were sharing in that post on LinkedIn that you felt that this was a first. And so I’d love to understand what that check is. Who sent it to you and what was it for and why is it a first?
Renata Jenik:
Yeah, I was looking for the check here on the pile of check on the table, historic check. I need to frame it. That’s a very, very special check. It’s basically the first time that a health plan pays for chef services for chefs that go into patient’s homes. It’s people that have chronic conditions or some acute health condition, and they pay for the chef service and also for a cooking lesson. So it’s beyond just meal delivery. We know that there are a lot of meal delivery options out there that are considered medically tailored meals, but this is one step forward of supporting more customized and fresh wholesome food that’s being cooked at a person’s home. So actually those patients can get salads and fresh vegetables. They’re a variety of dishes, but it’s something very innovative. And then the other option is the cooking lesson where our goal is to increase people’s health spend like yours by giving them the skills and helping them get the tools they need to do that.
James Maskell:
Yeah, I love that. We’ve spoken about a lot that ultimately, can you actually be healthy without learning to cook? And it’s definitely much harder, right? Because even if you can get the best ingredients, you always have the preservatives and you’re not actually building the robust skills. And so many of those skills turn into some of the extra benefits like friendships that are built around the table and so forth. So I’d love to just share where do you come up with this concept and how long has it been going, and what is it about this concept that you think is differentiated from what else you see out there?
Renata Jenik:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a long story, but I’ll make it short. And by the way, this check that we got from the health plan is actually, we’re already accepting patients. So for me, it was not just saying, Hey, we got a contract, but we’re actually already served patients and already build the health plan. So it’s beyond just the beginning. We’re already in it and the revolution is already happening. And how did I get to this in the first place? So I didn’t know that when I was young, but apparently I was insulin resistant and I had have PCOS all my life just there wasn’t enough research done about this condition. I just found just a few years ago that it all starts with insulin resistance, and I was struggling all my life with nutrition and food, having a family with four kids and running around in activities working.
I worked at Intel and the other semiconductor companies. My husband works full-time, just no time to cook. And frankly, I also didn’t gain the cooking skills from my family. My dad was the one that cooked. So the bottom line is that we ended up eating out a lot or doing meal delivery, which is not good because you don’t control the ingredients. And obviously when you’re DoorDash and Uber Eats, it’s just whatever the restaurants are putting in our food or I also had a very good friend at the aisles and the frozen aisles and the grocery store, trader Joe’s in particular, it’s a thing for us. The busy moms better than the fast food drive through lanes. Those are the options basically for busy people. I’m educated, I’m informed, I want to live healthy, and that’s what I did. Yeah, that’s what I did, and it created inflammation in my body.
I wasn’t happy about what’s going on. And long story short, I found a chef that came to our home because I wanted fresh food cooked at my home. When I was out with all the kids, four kids and me and my husband, we had to split between us of where we go and when, and then the chef came to our home and prepared food. When we came back, the food was ready at home with organic ingredients. Everything is clean, no preservatives, no seed oil, which was the key for me because even if you can get it to be healthy outside in restaurants still, you get the seed oils and all the stuff that the edge check these restaurants, which is awful. Anyway, so the chef for a hundred dollars a week came to our home and we had food for the whole week. Each one got what they wanted, and each one in our family has different nutrition.
So that’s how it started and it blew my mind. My friends were shocked, and eventually I built a whole business around this experience. First experience left Intel and started for them targeting consumer market, just families like yours, mines people that are health conscious and want to eat better. That was the beginning, small problem. It was also the pandemic when we started. So the world shut down on us when we just started and we kept on going, improving the platform and the user experience. And it took some time until I met Dr. David Lebarsky. Did you hear about the name Dr. David Lebarsky?
Yeah. Yeah. He used to be UC Davis, CEO. And I met him in a social event and I told him what I’m doing, and he’s like, you have to bring it to health. And I’m like, okay, who are you? Why? And he became a good friend and a mentor, and he helped us pivot and figure out a path. Him plus Michelle Roche is one, community health, CEO. Between the two of them, we figured out a way to get into the health system. It was very new to me, and basically to get also the first contract with Anthem, we have a few other health plans in the pipeline working to get the contracts from them, so, so that’s how it all, but I needed to figure out in the beginning, how do we make it affordable? So health plan will pay for that, and I didn’t need to do any discounts for the health plan. They just went with our regular model. So if you go today to our platform and use it as a consumer, you get the same prices like the health plan, but of course different food because with the health plan, we have more curated recipes for different chronic conditions. That’s the story, very short story of how we got there.
James Maskell:
Yeah, it’s really cool. Yeah, I love that. How do you deal with the fact that different people think different foods are healthy? So even in our world, if you go to a lifestyle medicine doctor, they’re going to teach you to eat vegan and no oil and so forth, whereas if you went to some other type, it might be like a Mediterranean diet or even paleo diet. How did you deal with that in your family, and then how did you turn that into the system?
Renata Jenik:
Yeah, so I tested a lot of stuff in my family, and my husband actually, he grew up vegan, so all his family are vegan and we’re eating a lot of vegan food at home. Initially I was oil free also in my nutrition. So my solution, hearing so many different opinions, I just say yes to everything on food. So we have everything You want me to train, you want oil free, you want this? Yes, we’ll do it for you because when you put in one room, 10 people, you have 10 different opinions and each one, what is the truth? There is no absolute truth. Each body is designed differently and different things work for different people. So I respect that. And we support different approaches and we’re not taking one side or another. You see, you have so many different religions. So you have also in nutrition, different religions of nutrition. No problem at all. We’ll support all of you. There are some ground guidelines, a ground base that we won’t have seed oil or this kind of things that we’re avoiding on the platform. But other than that, we have different nutrition beliefs or styles from kosher halal to the gluten-free, the vegan, the plant-based, you name it.
James Maskell:
Yeah. So tell me about this. How do you ensure that the user gets the benefit of the empowerment and knowledge and the cooking skill as opposed to the chef coming in while everyone’s out making the food and leaving? Yeah.
Renata Jenik:
So first of all, what I learned in my life throughout New Years that I’m on this earth, that when someone doesn’t want to learn, you can’t shove it down their throat. So they need to want to learn. So we open this cooking lessons as an option. If someone doesn’t want it, nothing we can do about this. We can only promote and offer this. Now there is no, many people want the convenience and they don’t want to cook, which is fine. Then we have the consumer side, just pay for this and someone will come. Many people don’t want to clean their houses either, and they hire cleaners totally fine. We’re cheaper than house cleaners. So that’s on the consumer side. On the health side also, you can’t force people, and some of them are in health condition that they can’t even stay. But for those that do that can manage their health condition, we’re working with them and we offer them the cooking lessons.
And then the chef basically teaches them how to make some of the meals, and then we provide them the recipes after. They’re very simple and cost effective. And also we’re working with a food bank in Rancho Cordova. It’s a food hub. And what I heard from their directors that they provide groceries to many people that many times they dunno what to do with it. So that’s where we’re coming in with the cooking lessons. And of course, the chef that’s already visiting the people’s homes, by the way, the duration of the prescription for medical patients is 90 days. So it’s three months and the chef comes every other week. So that’s a lot of touch points there. And if you need to acquire a new habit, it takes 21 days. Here you have 90 days, which is wonderful. So ideally that’s a good ground to make a big difference.
We’ve just started this program, so I’ll happy to come back and report on how it goes. We’re also bringing on board a lifestyle medicine clinician doctor that will help us do outcome study. So we’re just setting all of this up, and in a few months we’ll have a little bit more data. But that’s my thinking of how to approach it, just make it accessible. By the way, the patients, when they have a chef come to their home, they’re so shocked that a chef comes to their home, that it’s mind blowing and they’re very grateful. So they actually are interested in what the chef is doing. So I approach think about this, like our kids, you want to approach and to make them curious versus force them to do something that is highly likely, then you get higher chances of them participating.
James Maskell:
Yeah. So tell me about these chefs. Where do you find them and how are they trained? And it seems to me that my wife, Rachel, who she’s not a chef, but she would be extremely capable of doing what you’re saying. When I met her 20 years ago, she was cooking for 120 people every day. How do you determine who could be a good fit as a chef, and then how do you assign the different chefs to the different customers?
Renata Jenik:
Yeah, yeah, that’s a very, very good question. So we started Ham and we’re still at that phase where we’re taking only professional chefs or people with professional culinary experience. So they worked in kitchens, and the reason for that is because they’re trained, they can work. They trained under stress in real kitchen, in a production environment. So this translates well to going into people’s homes, still need to have some adjustment, not the same when you go to every time to someone else’s home. The kitchens are not very efficient. You have it in restaurant. We tested it also with, I didn’t know about Rachel’s culinary experience. I would love to learn that too. But I did try with some people that love to cook and do it for, I would say for they’re really, really passionate about cooking and even doing it for others, but it’s more of recreational cooking.
It didn’t translate well for a few different reasons. So we put it on hold. And if you remember Uber versus Lyft. So when Uber started, they started with the professional drivers, and then Lyft started with the recreational drivers. So we’re taking Uber’s approach, starting the professional chefs, and then we will create a program to help the recreational chefs or cooks at home to transition to this kind of environment. And there are a few ideas that we’re debating because there are millions of Americans, 10% of Americans are passionate cooks. So that’s why 35 million Americans, we won them.
James Maskell:
Well, that’s amazing. I would say over the last 15 years, certainly being in the advocacy for the health coach as a role in medicine where you’re supporting patients to make healthier choices and getting into the nitty gritty of what the day-to-day health options look like, and you’ve heard smarter people than me saying, Hey, with a million health coaches could really make an impact in health with a million chefs, we could make a pretty big impact too, right?
Renata Jenik:
Oh my gosh, I love that. Oh, I’m borrowing your quote there. Imagine the impact you can do with a million chefs that are cooking healthy food. Oh my gosh, yes.
James Maskell:
No, I love that. Well, look, I’m really the—
Renata Jenik:
Slogan, actually, I’m going to—
James Maskell:
Yeah, you should put it up on the website. You can have that from here. Well, look, I want to just sort of, I guess, so for people who are interested, where are you serving right now and how do you see that you’ll grow? People obviously listen from across the world here, but people all across the country for sure. What’s your current stage and where do you see going from here?
Renata Jenik:
Yeah, so currently we have chefs available across California on the consumer side, on the unconstrained side where people can just go and book a chef, starting from, of course, our area, El Dorado County, Sacramento County, plaster yellow, going all the way down to the Bay Area, the entire Bay area, including North Bay, east Bay, south Bay, San Francisco, and then LA and San Diego. So we have chefs available in all those areas. If someone wants to book on their own and the chefs will cook healthy food, no problem at all. On the health side, the coverage of the health plan, so we’re currently working with Anthem, Medi-Cal, or Medicaid patients in Sacramento County. So if anyone is serving this kind of population, we have reach out to me or just go to our website and refer patients there. We have a clear link how to apply, and we’re working on adding more counties and more health plans in California. And then our plan is once we finish raising our seed round, we plan to expand to other areas. The goal eventually is to be available nationwide and even worldwide if the model works by stuff in the us, we have people signing up from everywhere in the world.
James Maskell:
Well, wonderful. Well, I’m so glad to have met you and to connect on this and to support you in this because I think it’s awesome and I’m glad that someone’s doing it. And I guess I just want to reflect on we met because of the Healthy El Dorado event, we wouldn’t have met otherwise. And part of the energy of why I wanted to put on that event is because I just realized I thought that I knew that there were really cool health focused businesses in the county that most people didn’t know about. And I was thinking some of the cool farms or some of the core practitioners or groups, but I was surprised to find that your thing was here and also that it was so awesome. And so I guess I’d just love to get your thoughts on could El Dorado County be a real hub for health span innovation? Because in El Dorado County, you have what you’re doing. You have all of the organizations that you met at last week’s event, right? So there’s all kinds of interesting functional medicine clinics. You’ve got innovation in food delivery, you’ve got innovation in food growing. There’s biodynamic and regenerative farms. But also Dr. Christine Burke is there with her business, true neuro that we’re involved with in supporting. And ultimately their mission is to reverse cognitive decline and support any clinic to reverse cognitive decline. You could argue that El Dorado County is a hub for health span innovation, and I’d love to get your thoughts on whether you think that’s true.
Renata Jenik:
So first of all, we’re already yes. The answer is yes. We are a hub and we’re making a change and difference in the world. And you’re working on stopping the decline, cognitive decline, and working on stopping any reversing, managing, reversing and preventing any medical condition and physical condition was just the most healthy nutrition have. I have a lot of partners here locally, and thanks to your voice and with this podcast, we can make it. It’s all about people being aware of what we’re doing and connecting and working with us. So we have a great seeds here in our county, and I can’t wait until we can partner and work better together. I also didn’t know about you guys, so thanks to the bank that you put together now together we’re stronger. So let’s see how we can develop those relationships and feed more people start working together to make the big difference in our county. It’s also outside of our county
James Maskell:
All about—
Renata Jenik:
Branding.
James Maskell:
Yeah, I want to just double click into that because ultimately the purpose of Healthy El Dorado was really to have a sort of a foundational model for what I think is the next era. So typically, and you don’t know the history, but in between 2014 and 2019, we were very involved in starting communities of doctors who were thinking in a new way, right? Lifestyle medicine, functional medicine. It was called the Functional forum. And part of the reason why there’s actually a lot of good functional medicine doctors in El Dorado County is because there was a meetup for years that Dr. Christine Burke ran. And so all these other doctors that would show up at the meetup would gain confidence from the fact that they were getting these positive externalities from being in community with these other doctors and saying like, Hey, are you seeing that if you change someone’s diet to this, they can reverse their autoimmune condition? Yeah, I saw that too. So it’s like whereas if you went and asked that in front of your other internist friends, they might laugh you out of the room.
That was the phase for that time and the phase for the time right now, when we have a real push towards food as medicine, you have a real desire everywhere in every state to transform the school lunch and also now support from on high to say, Hey, we really need to do something about food and chronic disease. It just seems like there’s a new model that’s needed for a new time. And if every other reason that I’ve given on this podcast and in my newsletter for doing these local community meetups is not enough, here’s another reason, which is that there are gems and there’s gold in them, their hills literally here. But there are other organizations in your county probably if you’re listening to this, who are maybe at the very beginning or maybe further along in creating systems to really create health. And I think the first thing that we need to do is to connect all those people. And so I’m grateful—
James Maskell:
My thesis also has sort of been confirmed by us connecting—
Renata Jenik:
A hundred percent, a hundred percent about putting us all together and bright minds together make a change. And I think it’s pivotal time now, like you mentioned, with the changes around us and in the world, and it’s perfect timing to just take this message out as loud as we can and make a real difference. I’m connecting now with more and more functional medicine and lifestyle medicine and integrative medicine doctors. We have already one on our team, interpretive medicine doctor from Sutter and working on adding another one that’s joining us lifestyle medicine doctor, and they’re not necessarily from Rado County, but there are networks that are more and more, if we can be the hub and connect with all of them, then this network will start living on its own and become critical mass.
James Maskell:
Beautiful. Let me ask you this. So one of the things that I would love to ask you is what is the feedback? Obviously rich people are used to having a chef. What does this look like when one of your chef goes into a Medi-Cal home? What is the energy there and how do the chefs experience it?
Renata Jenik:
Yeah, that’s very, very interesting. We are starting now to have more and more patients, but from the first wave of patients, what we saw, actually very nice and humble people, teachings are very clean. They’re shocked that somebody is coming to their home, but they’re very welcoming and very happy, love the food. And we’re using technology, of course, we have a chef and we have a medical team that create the recipes, but we’re actually using also AI to meet the budgets. And altogether when it comes to that, I’m testing the recipes at home. So my family eats the medical food too, which is actually eat our own food. And the feedback that we get from the patients, they’re super happy about the, they just didn’t believe that it’s even possible that it’s such an option will be available for them. And the rich people are used to this, and we’re a different model than the way the rich people are using chefs.
Or they can hire a full-time chef that will leave with them at the home or come every day. This is a different model where a chef comes once every two weeks on the consumer side, by the way, when we’re serving the middle class families, the chef comes once a week. So again, it’s taking this very expensive and luxurious service, bringing it down to earth. It’s think about these people that have house minerals are already outsourcing the cleaning of the house. Now this is an option to outsource the meal preparation at lower cost than their house cleaner. So we’re solving the same problem with the same prices for both the middle class, which is majority of the population, well, it’s not majority, sorry, actually they’re underserved. There are two big populations. They’re very rich people. It’s like a very small percentage. So they don donate our help.
It’s more about the rest of the population, and this is what I’m aiming from day one. When I started, I wanted to help everyone. So I did my time and I said, okay, where’s the biggest portion? How do we help them? How do we design this to help them? And it’s working. Apparently they’re happy. The chef is happy. The chefs, a few of them reported to us, their cooking times are accurate. They’re able to finish in time, so they’re getting paid well. It’s not like obviously Palo Alto type of pay, but they’re still making, they can make potentially between $6, $7,000 a month if they work full-time. That’s just their pay. Versus a full-time chef can make closer to $10, $12,000. So it’s different. But still here in Sacramento, you can make a lot of money from that. And then they’re happy because they’re helping, they’re filler on a mission to help sick people. And the patients are, they actually can’t even believe it that they have a chef come to their home. And so far, the feedback we got was super happy trying to get a few more documented feedback from these patients, but it is HIPAA. We didn’t have to be HIPAA compliant. So it’s
A sensitive topic, but very, very happy. And they’re all rebooking. The chefs, they get it for 90 days and then we can reapply to get authorization for another prescription period. So far, knock wood, a hundred percent success.
James Maskell:
Wonderful. Well, look, I am very excited to see this out. My mind is spinning with the possibilities for people in my life who I think need it or would be a great chef or otherwise.
If you are interested, check out food.com and we’ll have more information in the show notes about Renato and her amazing efforts. And this another shout out to you if you’re interested in building your community and stepping into leadership to deliver it. If you go to your Healthy County Leaders Facebook group, you can see all the people that are amassed in there. And we have upcoming this summer Healthy Jefferson County. We have a couple other counties in California. We have Healthy Kansas City all coming down the pipe. And there’s an opportunity for you to lead this and think about how different your life could be in a few months if you were connected to all of the groups in your community. This is the highest form of wealth that you can create, is to be connected to all the food related and health related entities in your community. Renata, thank you for being here.
Renata Jenik:
Thank you very much. If I just may add that our, yeah, if someone wants to visit our website, is that it’s MyFoodom.com
James Maskell:
My
Renata Jenik:
Foodom. Yes. And everybody’s welcome of course, always to send us an email to service@myfoodom.com or health@myfoodom.com. And I’m getting all these emails to read and respond.
James Maskell:
Wonderful. Alright. Thank you, Renata. This is the Evolution of Medicine podcast. You’ve been hearing about really the evolution of medicine, which is putting chefs inside people’s homes to not only cook them the food, but teach them to cook. This is a really exciting, really exciting moment and the fact that it’s happening just down the road for me, even more exciting. Thanks so much for tuning in.
Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools, like the Group Visit Toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
Subscribe
Download
Click here to download this podcast
music provided by intomusic.co
