Kent Prepared Food of the Year Winner: Yes Chef's Steak & Blue Cheese Pie

Yes Chef provides ingredient boxes packed with fresh, local ingredients, delivered to your door for you to prepare wholesome, balanced and fresh food for all the family.

Our wide variety of meat, fish and plant-based recipes means you’ve always got a great selection
of family-friendly recipes to choose from. Our boxes include all the ingredients you need to prepare and cook delicious meals, along with easy-to-follow recipe cards. Don’t feel like cooking but still want a lovingly prepared, home-cooked meal? Try our Lazy Day range, full of exciting dishes such as Braised Beef & Herb Dumplings or a Spicy Roasted Squash Tagine.

Yes Chef was formed in the first lockdown through one of our pubs – The Chequers, Aylesford. We
started providing meals free-ofcharge to those who were vulnerable and isolating in Aylesford village. We had an abundance of chefs and access to plenty of food when the supermarkets were running low and we wanted to be able to help the community. Word soon spread and we were contacted by family members of the vulnerable in the surrounding villages. We very quickly began delivering some 250 meals a day, with the help of our talented chefs and amazing volunteer delivery drivers. We would deliver the meals daily and in many instances our volunteers would be the only contact that some of these elderly people would have for weeks on end and we were told how much some of them looked forward to just seeing someone, even if it was only for a few minutes each day. We then started putting together packages of ‘ready meals’ that anyone could purchase from us and very quickly got comments on how much better and fresher they tasted than anything out of a supermarket. These were still sold through The Chequers and became our Chequers at Home range.

We then saw the rise in recipebox subscriptions – with all this time on their hands, people were experimenting more with recipes and cooking meals from scratch at home. This is how Yes Chef, our recipe box subscription, was born. What set us aside from other recipe box companies was our restaurant quality dishes. We worked with top London chefs to create recipes that our consumers could try at home, something a bit more exciting than you would find from our competitors.

Our Chequers at Home range soon became our Lazy Day range – an add-on to our recipe boxes that meant if you didn’t feel like cooking one evening, you could have a ‘Lazy Day’. We continued developing recipes and then started our own individual pie range. What sets us aside from other pies that you might find on supermarket shelves is the quality of the meat and how much you find in each pie.

We use chunks of tender beef and lamb from Red Tractor Assured farms that melt in your mouth, as well as locally sourced ingredients where possible. Our Steak, Ale and Blue Cheese Pie uses cheese from award-winning Kingcott Dairy, a dairy farm in the heart of Kent. Our Steak & Ale and Steak, Ale & Blue Cheese Pies use an awardwinning ale from Kent Brewery and our Cheesy Potato Pie uses potatoes grown at David Catt’s farm in Boughton Monchelsea. The rest of the fresh ingredients in our range are sourced from David Catt and Watts Farm, both of whom grow the majority of their produce in Kent. We genuinely believe that using local is best and we continue to strive for this throughout the company.