Wade Armstrong

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Introducing Dine to Thrive

Posted Monday May 7, 2007 in Entrepreneurship

For the past year, I’ve been working on starting a company, and I’m proud to announce that we are finally in business. Really, it’s just the beginning of an entrepreneurial journey, but it feels like a big change to me. So, here it is: introducing Dine to Thrive.

About Dine to Thrive

Every year, 35,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in Los Angeles County alone. It’s a terrifying diagnosis - a matter of life and death - and it affects the whole lives of the people who receive it. Foremost in the mind of those who are diagnosed with cancer is the question of how to fight it. More and more, people are choosing to fight cancer with complementary therapies, and one of the most important of these is diet change. Eating the right food can:

• Reduce the frequency and severity of many side effects of treatment
• Help heal from chemotherapy and radiation, both of which can kill healthy cells as well as diseased ones
• There’s emerging clinical evidence that, in some cases, eating right can reduce the long-term rate of recurrence of some cancers

Clearly, eating right can be an important part of the fight against cancer. But eating right is hard - really, most of us are bad about doing it every day. That’s where Dine to Thrive comes in. We make it easy and delicious to eat right - for people who really need to eat that way.

About the Idea

I originally started out wanting to help people who, like me, have food allergies. We have to give up a lot of our favorite foods to keep from getting sick, and that can be tough. In many cases, it’s possible to replace the offending ingredients with some substitute and get a satisfying duplicate of the favorite food - but most people don’t have the knowledge to discover all of the substitutions, or the skill in the kitchen to use all of the substitutes in a satisfying way. I wanted to help people by shipping satisfying, delicious food made with these replacement ingredients.

Unfortunately, everyone has a different combination of allergies, and that meant that we’d have to cook basically every meal custom for every customer. Add to that the fact that many allergy sufferers can have life-threatening reactions to even a hint of certain ingredients, and there was no business model here.

But I still wanted to help people with food - so I started to look for groups of people who needed to eat right, but had a hard time doing it. After a lot of research, I felt that helping people with cancer was the right idea. So here we are.

Starting the Company

Starting Dine to Thrive has been quite the experience - as, I’m sure, every start-up is. This is my second, and it’s amazing how different the experience is than my first. We got great lawyers and accountants, a top chef, and have worked to build relationships with some of LA’s best oncologists and nutritionists. Along the way, I’ve dealt with everything from permits to taxes to packaging design to FedEx schedules. The most stressful part is that everything has to get done; the most exciting part is that everything I do is essential to my company.

What’s Next?

We’ve just begun to ship our meals to our customers, and will be expanding our sales and reach soon. It’s more of the same and more of even more. I’ll have a lot to say about sales, about marketing, about operations, and about how to deal with the roller coaster that is being an entrepreneur. I’m excited to experience it, and I’m excited to write about it here.

In the meantime, tell your friends about us. If they ever need us, we’re just over at http://dinetothrive.com.