Welcome Home
A new meal delivery service from a Brooklyn mom with new parents in mind.
Mandela Cocores has news for you: New mothers don’t need more onesies.
The founder of Welcome Home, a homemade nutrient-dense meal delivery service for new parents, is adamant about this. “When a baby is born, we don’t think about how hard it is for the mom, how exhausting it is, or how overwhelmed the new parents are. We think of giving more for the baby, but thinking about the mom is really important.”
Mandela, who spent her career in marketing and branding, has had a serious crush on cooking for years, doing dinner parties at home for friends and family who inevitably said things like, “you need to do a recipe blog,” or “you have to open a restaurant.” But for Mandela, cooking could not be work, it was her passion. “I love feeding people,” she told me a few weeks ago when we chatted. “I love making big dinners for friends and family. I didn’t want it to be my job. I wanted to keep it close to my heart.”
But then, she had her second baby during COVID and things changed. “I am the cook in my family and it was peak pandemic, and I didn’t know what we were going to do,” she recalled. She knew caring for her older child, while nursing and taking care of the baby would not allow for much cooking time. She searched for a meal delivery service made for a family and couldn’t find anything. “The meals were for individuals, not families, and none of them had the nutrients that a new mom recovering from delivery would need.” She was saved by a network of friends who came over with home cooked dinners. “I had them in my freezer and I knew it was made with love and that was good for me.”
The idea for Welcome Home was born from those meals, care packages of casseroles and stews made with love, with her and her family in mind. Despite being hesitant to turn her passion into a business, she felt cooking for new parents would be something that felt good. “I had a few friends who had babies, and while I was making the food for them it felt good because I knew it was helping someone recover. I felt I could put love into it, and then it would not burn me out.”
She launched Welcome Home in May 2022 while keeping her day job in marketing, at a food startup Wonder. But soon she knew she wanted to give everything to her newborn business. “I loved Welcome Home and the mission, and I want to be able to feed people.” She went all in.
To create her recipes, all of which are gluten-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free, Mandela worked with a postpartum nutritionist to ensure all meals are thoughtfully built with good amounts of protein, healthy fats, and lots of fiber, the three biggest aspects of nutrition a new mother needs for recovery. She also learned about food items like oats (good for milk supply) and the high protein value of nutritional yeast which is plant based and makes its way into a lot of recipes to amp up the nutritional content.
The menu, made fresh and then frozen for delivery to your home, changes weekly and it includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner in 3-day, or 5-day meal plans. Every meal is meant to feed a family of four. For breakfast you might get chia oatmeal porridge, blueberry oatmeal muffins, or smoothies. Lunch is always soup: sundried tomato roasted pepper soup, quinoa lentil, Moroccan chickpea stew, white bean sausage stew, and turmeric chicken soup have recently made appearances. “After having a baby you need something hot and easily digestible so that’s always a soup.”
Dinner is usually a heartier meal that you can easily heat up and sit down and eat with your family: meatballs and tomato sauce, braised chicken with chard, dates and olives, Thai chickpea curry, sheet pan gluten-free lasagna with tofu ricotta and salsa verde.
Mandela makes deliveries herself on Sundays, traveling to homes across Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and parts of New Jersey. The in-person delivery can be time consuming, but she says it gives her a chance to check in on the new parents. “Not everyone wants to talk but some people do. I text everyone on my personal phone their delivery time to make sure they know this is me, a real person making food for them. The human touch is sometimes lost so I personally text everyone and see if they want to ask me questions, or want me to leave food a special way, or with someone else.”
For Mandela, Welcome Home is much more than just a meal service. “My mission is that women and mothers, new parents, need support when they come home,” she said. “People talk about how to take care of a baby, but you need to take care of mom when she comes home. It is so important to be there to care for our mothers who are dealing with postpartum recovery, with all the hormones raging and so much pressure to breastfeed and sleep. That’s where my passion and energy drives from.”
Sign up and learn more about Welcome Home here.
This is really amazing!
What a wonderful idea!
I especially love the personal touch she is giving to all of our customers on Sundays. It’s amazing when you can turn your passion into a job that fills a need for other people. Congratulations!