New Dubai service Slice and Dice brings healthy eating home

Holly Bennie makes a Slice and Dice delivery on the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai. Sarah Dea / The National

A new service in Dubai is seeking to bring healthy home cooking back to households in the take­away-fixated city.

Slice and Dice will, for Dh290 a week for two people, bring you a weekly delivery of fresh, mostly organic, local goodies, and a weekly meal plan that includes the recipes to make healthy evening meals for the next four nights. Recipes include one meat, one poultry, one fish and one vegetable dish, and are designed to be simple to follow and take no more than 30 minutes to prepare.

So, to recap: Slice and Dice will plan your week’s meals, do your shopping and deliver it, along with a set of simple cooking instructions – making you the envy of your pizza-scoffing neighbours – all for about the same price as a takeaway.

The service is the brainchild of Holly-Lynn Bennie, who had become increasingly frustrated that she had no time to shop, plan and cook healthy meals following the birth of her second child and moved to improve matters.

“We started because I had two children and we found we weren’t eating until late at night and inevitably calling for pizza,” she explains. “I was putting weight on after having my baby, rather than losing it, which wasn’t the plan, so we decided we needed to get back to home cooking.

“First of all, my husband offered to do the cooking, but that was a disaster – he even made macaroni cheese and didn’t drain the water. So we took stock and decided to be really regimented. I’d make a list of exactly what ingredients we needed, exactly how we’d cook them and took it from there.”

Once she was following the regime, it seemed a logical next step to expand and offer it to others.

“We thought: ‘We can’t be the only ones in this position,’ so we upscaled what we were already doing and turned it into a business,” says Bennie. “I didn’t want to go back to my real-estate job because of the hours anyway, and I was already spending a lot of time investigating organic suppliers, planning menus and so on, so it was virtually a job already. A lot of our clients are people with young families, like us, who struggle to get out for shopping, and once people hear about us they love the concept.”