For a country that thinks about food constantly, Americans are remarkably bad at actually eating well. We invented the $20 superfood smoothie, fight about which dietary philosophy is the most effective, and have more nutrition information at our fingertips than any generation in history. And yet, with diet-related disease among the leading cause of death in the US and over 19 million people living in food deserts, we are one of the least healthy developed nations in the world.
Joey Grassia thinks the solution is hiding in plain sight: the talented cook down the street who has been cheffing for his or her family and neighbors their whole life, and never thought to charge for it. His startup Shef is working to reimagine food culture, connecting these local culinary talents with their neighbors and, in doing so, asking the question: can you fundamentally transform the way a country eats?
Elsa Lehrer: What role did family play in shaping how you think about food?
Joey Grassia: Everything. I grew up in a Sicilian household where food was one of the most important parts of life. No matter what was going on, dinner was the moment where everyone came together.
I didn’t realize how important that was until I left for college. My dirty secret is that I’m actually not a great cook. My mom, my grandparents, my aunt—they were the chefs in the household. So suddenly I was living on fast food and packaged food.
My sophomore year I started having chest pains and migraines that landed me in the hospital several times. The amount of sodium and nitrates I was eating was off the charts. I had high blood pressure at eighteen.
So I started making these homemade energy bars just to survive college. Oats, seeds, dried fruit, honey. Honestly they tasted pretty terrible at first, but I got better at it.
After college I went to Facebook, but about nine months into the job my mother passed away unexpectedly. That was a turning point for me. I remember thinking: I have this amazing job at Facebook, but it feels like I’m selling pixels on a screen. Food is real. It’s tangible. It’s one of the most human things you can possibly work on.
So I quit and started my first food company based on those energy bars. For every bar we sold we would feed someone in need. The company eventually grew into national distribution—Whole Foods, Costco, Safeway. But being inside the food industry, I realized firsthand how broken the system is.
Coming from tech, you expect people to challenge systems when they’re broken. In food, everything was broken and nobody seemed interested in changing it.
Eventually I sold that company and spent about a year and a half traveling around the world. I still believed there had to be a better way to build a food system, and I wanted to see how other cultures approached it.
What struck me was that many communities that were far less affluent than the United States were eating far better than we were. Even in small towns where people were barely making ends meet, the quality of their diet was higher. And when you looked closely, the reason was simple: their food systems were still community-based. People were growing for one another, cooking for one another, gathering around food together.
That’s when the idea for Shef clicked. If platforms like Airbnb and Uber could connect people through technology, why couldn’t we do the same for home cooking?
EL: Do you remember a specific moment growing up that captures what food meant in your family?
JG: There’s one dish that, for me, completely represents home: braciole. My family makes it during the holidays. It takes all day to prepare and you almost never see it in restaurants because it’s so labor-intensive.
When we were growing up, holidays always meant inviting people over—friends, extended family, sometimes people who didn’t have anywhere else to go. And that dish was always at the center of the table.
Years later, after we launched Shef in New York during the pandemic, a cook from Tuscany listed braciole on the platform. My dad saw it and ordered it for the team. I remember taking the first bite and getting emotional because it was the first time since my mom passed away that I had gathered with others to share that dish.
That’s what we hear from customers all the time. Someone will say, “I haven’t had this dish in twenty years until I found it on Shef.” Every culture has some version of that story.
Our mission now is to bring humanity back to mealtime. The core feeling we want people to have is the same feeling you had sitting at the dinner table with your parents or grandparents—that sense of being taken care of.
EL: As the company grows, how do you preserve that authenticity?
JG: The key is that you can’t scale these dishes the way the traditional food industry tries to scale things. You can’t take someone’s mother’s recipe and suddenly make a million of them in a factory. When companies try to do that, the quality just collapses.
Instead, we scale by bringing more cooks onto the platform. Each cook can only make a certain number of meals, and that’s intentional. Our "shefs" sell out all the time. That limitation is actually part of the beauty of the model.
Everything on the platform is organized around the shef themselves. We could have designed the app so people browse by dish, but we deliberately made it browse by shef. Two different cooks might make the same dish in completely different ways, and that individuality is the whole point.
EL: Do you think a model like this can actually change American food culture?
JG: I think people really crave this kind of connection. Humans are social creatures. For all the strengths of capitalism, the incentives in our food system have pushed things toward being more and more impersonal.
You see this in the direction food technology is going—automated kitchens, machines in warehouses making hamburgers. That’s the trajectory of the industry.
What we’re doing is almost the opposite. You know who cooked your meal. You know their story. Sometimes they even include handwritten notes in the bag. And customers love that. The reaction we get when someone receives a note from the person who made their dinner tells you something about what people are missing.
Food is a universal language. You might disagree with someone about politics or culture, but when you taste a dish from their background you suddenly understand something about their world.
EL: Could a decentralized cooking model also help address food deserts?
JG: Potentially, yes. In many food deserts the only options available are fast food chains. But every community still has amazing home cooks. If someone in that community can share meals with their neighbors, suddenly families have access to something closer to homemade food instead of just fast food. In some ways the model could be even more impactful there than in cities that already have lots of dining options.
EL: What does success look like ten years from now?
JG: I think we’ll see a broader shift toward decentralized food systems where communities cook for one another again. Millions of people are incredible cooks but they’ll never open restaurants because the barrier is too high. Starting a restaurant might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it’s a 24/7 job.
Platforms like ours lower that barrier dramatically. Someone can share their food with their community without having to build an entire restaurant around it.
At the same time, consumers are demanding more transparency. They want to know where their food comes from and who made it. We’re trying to meet both of those needs at once.
EL: What does your Sicilian family think of the idea?
JG: It’s funny because a lot of people in tech say their families don’t understand what they do. My family completely gets it. They might not understand the technology, but the concept makes perfect sense to them. In many places in Italy this is just how food works. People cook for one another. In a way we’re not doing anything new. We’re just trying to get back to the way humans ate for most of history.