About Family Thyme Meals
We're full-time working parents.
Between soccer practice (times two), dance class, and piano lessons, our family calendar looks like a game of Tetris. We both work full-time. The kids are busy. And yet we cook at home almost every night, eat vegetables daily, and only eat out once a week on the weekends,
We're not telling you this to brag. We're telling you because between the two of us, we've lived (and solved) the two hardest problems families with young kids face: getting dinner on the table around a packed schedule, and getting kids to actually eat what's on the plate.
Two problems. Two different kinds of expertise.
Anyone can hand you a recipe. What nobody tells you is when to cook it around a real schedule, or how to get a picky kid to eat vegetables without a nightly battle or a separate "kid meal." Those are two different problems, and most resources only ever solve one.
Carissa built the system: the planning, the scheduling, the shopping lists, the timelines that make a busy week actually work. Richard brings the food creativity and ideas for building flavor kids will accept and structuring a meal so vegetables get eaten first. We've translated all of it into something a tired parent can actually use on an activity-filled Tuesday night: a system that's both tested nightly in our own house and built on real experience. Our goal is to give you the tools so you can run things on your own efficiently, without needing to rely on so many services or subscriptions.
What we offer
Kids Veggie Guide ($11) — practical, bite-sized advice: which vegetables picky eaters actually accept, raw vs. cooked strategies, snack timing that doesn't ruin dinner. [Get the guidefd]
Kids Veggie Guide & 30-Day Challenge ($27) — a full month of dinners built specifically to get picky eaters trying real food, including four weekly recipe guides with grocery lists. [Get the guide →]
The Complete Family Feeding System ($127) — our full framework for ending mealtime power struggles for good: pantry lists, a four-week rotating menu, printable planners, a snack planner, and the exact serving strategy that gets vegetables eaten first — without hiding them or short-order cooking. [Get the system →]
If your family is busy, if dinner feels like an uphill battle, or both — we built this for you.
Because unlike a delivery box built for a household of two, ours is built for a family. Meal kit services measure out exact portions for a single meal, one and done — which works fine for two people, but scale that to a family with multiple kids and the cost climbs fast, portions rarely fit real appetites, and a shocking amount ends up in the trash. Our system is built the opposite way: we cook with leftovers in mind from the start, so one dinner covers two nights, cooking happens less often, and take-out stops being the default fallback when the week gets busy. Less waste, lower cost per meal, and more variety than a rotating box of the same few recipes ever offers.
About Richard
A classically trained chef, Richard grew up in the kitchen with his grandmother and mother. He knew at an early age that he wanted to work in the restaurant industry. He graduated from the University of North Texas in Restaurant & Hospitality Management, then went on to get his culinary degree from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, California. After a few years working as a chef at one of St. Helena’s most well-known wineries and opening up a brewery, Richard came back to Texas to settle down with Carissa and start a family. Since then he has worked as an Executive Chef where he oversaw a full kitchen and catering staff for oil and gas companies in the Houston area before starting Family Thyme Meals.
About Carissa
Carissa grew up with the opposite food background of Richard. With a quadriplegic mother, she didn’t grow up learning very much about cooking, but that all changed once she met Richard. She graduated from Texas Christian University with a degree in Strategic Communications and grew her career at a global public relations agency before founding Family Thyme Meals. She manages the business, marketing and social media for Family Thyme Meals.