If you’re new to the site, that’s Wendy on the left and Jess on the right. We are both Registered Dietitians with Master’s degrees in nutrition. We’re also certified diabetes educators. That’s where the MS, RD, CDE’s come from at the end of our name. The simplest way to describe us is BFFs who love to eat, cook and nerd out about anything nutrition related.
We like to change our hairstyles a lot, too (check out our YouTube page for living proof). In short, Food Heaven started in 2011 as a creative outlet to build community through food. Throughout the years, the brand has grown beyond our wildest dreams, but our philosophy has remained the same…nutritious food should be delicious and accessible. We’re intentional about taking on an inclusive, Health at Every Size approach, and so you’ll see we offer lots of resources on intuitive eating and body respect. To find out about all we have to offer on the website, check out our START HERE page. In the meantime, we invite you to browse around, pop a hello down below, and sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop.
One question we get all the time is “how did you meet?!”
Well, we met in 2008 through a mutual friend at a potluck. At that time, Jess was going back to school for her masters in nutrition, and a couple of years later, Wendy decided she wanted to pursue the same passion. Lots of organic chemistry, biochem, micro biology and nutritional biochemistry ensued.
While in grad school, we worked together facilitating cooking and nutrition workshops for the New York City Department of Health. We taught families how to shop healthfully on a budget and use culturally relevant foods to make tasty and nutritionally balanced meals. We found that community members were very receptive to us, and came back every week eager for more information.
When the farmer’s market season ended the conversation arose of how we could keep this going and reach a larger audience. In winter of 2010, we went to the Dominican Republic for a month-long “brainstorming retreat” to come up with ideas for creating something amazing that involved nutrition education and online media. But really, all we ended up doing was laying on the beach all day and taking selfies. Here’s one:
It literally wasn’t until our last night in DR that we actually focused enough to have an official “meeting” about how we could bring our ideas to life. We decided that filming videos and putting them out into internet-land would be the best way to reach a larger audience.
Flash forward six months and we were filming our very first episode. We’ll never forget that day, because after 10 hours of filming in Jess’ hot Brooklyn apartment, we realized that we didn’t have the mic turned on! 5 hours of footage. No audio. It was at that point that we knew we could either call it quits or dust ourselves off and try again. We chose the latter. Here’s the pic of us at our official launch party in June of 2011:
What started out with just a couple of viewers (specifically Jess’ Mom and Dad and Wendy’s Mami and Papi) has morphed an amazing YouTube community following of over 40,000 subbies. Throughout the years, our site has evolved, but our basic philosophy has remained the same: healthy eating should delicious, cost-effective, and (most importantly) easy. We want to help people live their best lives possible, and bring the fun back into food and wellness.
Thanks so much for reading and stopping by!
xo, Wen & Jess