Chef for you

If you've eaten at a fine restaurant recently, a company in Bonita Springs called Innovative Food Holdings likely had something to do with your meal.

About 40,000 chefs use more than 7,000 products ranging from French cheeses to exotic fruits and game meats that Innovative Food distributes to them daily. The company hires its own chefs to man the phones and to suggest different ways customers can serve the products it distributes.

Some foodies already use the company's ForTheGourmet.com consumer-oriented website, too. No fancy boxes here: consumers receive food wrapped in butcher paper just like the chefs do.

But in August, Innovative Food made a big push into delivering freshly prepared gourmet meals to the public when it paid $14 million to acquire The Fresh Diet.

It's a big deal: The Fresh Diet, which delivers meals to consumers in 573 cities across the nation, posted $24 million in revenues for the year ending June 30. That's about the same amount in sales that Innovative Food posted in 2013.

Fresh Diet customers can order breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks online and have them delivered to their door. Lunch might include a white albacore tuna salad on a spinach tortilla and dinner might be Thai curried noodles with tofu. For example, it costs $25 a day to have chef-prepared meals delivered under two- or four-week meal plans to a Fort Myers address.

Executives at Innovative Food didn't return several calls for comment, but the company recently posted quarterly revenues of $8.8 million for the three-month period ending Sept. 30. Those results included The Fresh Diet, which it acquired in a stock deal. Innovative Food's shares are publicly traded (symbol: IVFH; recent price: $1.30).

Innovative Food is really a technology company. It uses software it has developed to manage ordering and distribution with a relatively small staff. In a statement announcing the acquisition of the The Fresh Diet, CEO Sam Klepfish says the company's low infrastructure costs gives it the capability of expanding sales profitably.

“The Fresh Diet's platform offers the opportunity to expand into additional specialty food market categories including non-diet daily specialty meals, meal kits, allergen specific and additional platform-based specialty food opportunities, in the direct-to-consumer market as well as in select food service markets,” Klepfish says in a statement.

To accommodate the growth, Innovative Food moved its headquarters from a small office in Naples to a 10,000-square-foot building it purchased in Bonita Springs in 2013.

Although The Fresh Diet is Innovative Food's biggest acquisition, it isn't the only one. In October, the company acquired Organic Food Brokers, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based firm that helps launch and grow retail sales for small organic and specialty food brands nationwide.

In a statement about the Organic Food Brokers acquisition, Innovative Food President Justin Wiernasz alluded to the fact that the line between professionals and consumers is blurring in the specialty food arena. “We have been seeing continued convergence between retail and food service products in the rapidly changing specialty food distribution market,” Wiernasz says.

— Follow Jean Gruss on Twitter @JeanGruss