Healthy Meals, Delivered

For the first two decades of his career, Andy Levitt 92C spent most of his time promoting the value of Western medicine on behalf of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Now he has created his own plant-based meal-delivery service that he hopes will help customers live even healthier lives.

Levitt is founder and CEO of Purple Carrot, a subscription meal-kit delivery service he started out of his garage. It’s an interesting turn of events for someone who worked in the pharmaceutical industry before a documentary changed his life.

In January 2014, he and his wife watched Forks over Knives, a documentary advocating the adoption of a predominantly plant-based diet for improved health.

“I looked at my wife, and I said, ‘That is what I am going to do. I am going to start a meal-kit company that is going to offer people a plant-based approach,’ ” Levitt says.

Levitt began working nights and weekends, “becoming a vegan overnight for the next several months” to learn more about plant-based eating. “It’s not a very easy diet to follow,” he says. “I wanted to make it easier for people to adopt this style of eating.”

Levitt quit his day job and invested $125,000 to feed his new venture. In October 2014, he launched Purple Carrot’s website and shipped the first thirty-six boxes from his converted garage, with the help of his wife and one employee.

In March, the company teamed up with New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to offer plant-based performance meals. The partnership developed after Levitt, an avid Patriots fan, learned of Brady’s plant-centric diet. As an athlete, “Tom sees food as fuel, and understands that what he puts in his body is consistent with what he gets out,” Levitt says.

Recent Purple Carrot offerings include sweet pea flatbread with truffled fingerling potatoes and Kite Hill ricotta, and vegetable chow mein with baby leeks and miso mustard sauce.