Made in Tarrant: Chef launches healthy, personalized snack line

Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here.

Deb Oxman is making healthy, organic snacks to satisfy her clients’ nutritional needs.

Oxman, a chef and businesswoman who launched North Richland Hills-based Savor Culinary Services in 2002, said her new snack line is part of her catering membership service that prepares weekly personalized meals for individuals and business clients.

The Whole Food Snack Membership resulted from parents telling her that they wanted creative, customized healthy snacks for their children rather than having them grab a processed, sugary granola bar — which Oxman described as a “glorified candy bar.”

Adults love Oxman’s nutritious snacks, too.

“Now we have a lot of busy professionals that are wanting the snack membership because they can’t get up from their desk to go make lunch or they need a pick-me-up at 3,” she said.

Oxman was initially a licensed physical therapist who switched to a culinary career after she found that organic food improved symptoms of her son’s autism and severe attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She trained at the Culinary Institute of America, the Culinary Business Academy and the Culinary School of Fort Worth before launching her catering and culinary coaching businesses.

Oxman said her organic meals are sustainable, which appeals to customers who want to eat better.

“We do predominately organic meals,” she said. “The fish that we use is wild-caught. The cheeses are all-natural organic, a lot of times grass-fed or raw milk cheese. The crudite that you would get with hummus, those are organic carrots. This is a very healthy option.”

The snack line is offered as a stand-alone membership or as an add-on service to current clients. The line changes weekly and includes three organic portable snacks and one nourishing smoothie. 

Snack menu items include housemade granola bars; a mini charcuterie board with artisan meats, cheeses, organic fruits, whole grain crackers and pickled vegetables; housemade vegetable tots with organic ranch dipping sauce with organic broccoli, zucchini, carrot, eggs and cheddar; and an apple and blueberry smoothie with organic chia seeds.

Her organic granola bars are popular.

“These are made with organic oats, a paleo dark chocolate chip, and maple and honey, and chia seeds and nuts, and all those other things,” she said. “It’s just a healthy alternative (to) something that’s packaged.”

Prices for the snack membership are $155 a month for a mini snack box that includes four weekly deliveries and two servings per snack, and $195 a month for the family snack box that includes four weekly deliveries and four servings per snack. 

Contact information:

Savor Culinary Services

Phone: 817-277-3031

Email: [email protected]

Website: savorculinaryservices.com

The interview has been edited for clarity and space. 

Eric Garcia: How did you come up with the recipes for these snacks?

Deb Oxman: People are always surprised whenever we say we don’t use recipes. We just don’t, we never have. We’ve had clients for 10 years we’ve delivered weekly meals to, customized to them, and we never use recipes. We never repeat anything twice. So, the snacks are really and truly because we’ve gone the past 23 years providing snacks as part of a personalized chef service — because we can do breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. We know what their favorites are already. A lot of them are based on that, some of the family favorites that we know (from) the past 23 years. Believe it or not, kids love mini charcuterie boards. Kids love hummus.

Garcia: A lot of snack foods are highly processed, either really salty or full of sugar. What makes your snacks different?

Oxman: Because we can customize to the client, if someone cannot have salt or gluten or dairy or soy or eggs. Whatever that they need, we can customize those snacks to them. We’ve only done customization for (all these) years.

Garcia: Tell me about your catering business.

Oxman: So 23 years ago this coming August is when I started it. I started it as a traditional personal chef service when I went into the homes and made meals for families, left so many (meals), and out the door I went. About a year into it, I turned it into a model where I hired other chefs. We created everything from a commercial kitchen and then delivered it (the meals) to the client’s refrigerator. We don’t just drop off a cooler. Now, we customize the meals to travel schedules, to custody schedules, to food allergies, to food intolerances. We customize it down to the individuals within a family now. We do customized personalized chef services, we do private flight catering — we do a lot of private flight catering — and then we also do traditional catering as well. However, we have a tendency to end up catering smaller events just because of the quality of ingredients we use.

Garcia: How have chartered flights evolved into a component of your business?

Oxman: I actually have two businesses. I have Savor but I also have a culinary business coaching and consulting company that I’ve had now for about 12 years. … There was a private flight attendant — she works for a particular individual who owns several planes — who called me and said, “Can you teach me to be a personal chef?”… She said, “I can’t find” — her words — “in-flight or private flight caters that understand how to customize, that understand quality (to) really meet the demanding needs of a hiring clientele.” … The private flight attendants as a whole were not happy with (other companies). I said, “Instead of me teaching you, why don’t you show us how and we’ll give you a percentage of all the private flights catered.” … I said I work with other businesses across the country that do what I do. Why don’t you teach them and together we’ll grow and change the catering in the private flight industry. We do lunch-and-learn (events) for private flight attendants at Savor and it’s been an easy transition because we already had a few clients that own jets. It kind of became a great fit for us.

Garcia: What sort of food trends are you seeing among your clients?

Oxman: I study the food trends every single year, from the fusion to a Thai influence to the more plant-based eating, all of those things. You would be surprised that people, no matter what they ask you to start with, they always go back to what’s comforting to them. Always. You would think that, even on these private flights, that we’re sending caviar and lobster. No. A lot of times it’s just tea sandwiches and a great piece of steak and barbecue and those types of things. I can tell you that it’s not so much a trend as it is convenience and customization. … Our clientele are usually world travelers but they save that palate a lot of times for when they travel. When they’re home, they want to be home and eat familiar foods that they’re used to.

Garcia: What describes the clients using your service? It sounds like they tend to be busy people.

Oxman: Since Savor’s entire brand is food is medicine, they want to heal themselves through food. … We work with a lot of people that are undergoing cancer treatment to autoimmune diseases to diabetes to heart issues. … Some clients that we have may have disordered eating and they only trust us to provide meals for them, and if it’s not our food, they will not eat. That’s a lot of responsibility there. 

We have clients who have healed themselves through food or traditional medicine, or both, and now they are busy or they just don’t want to cook anymore, and now they want to maintain that healing. … They actually can be elderly parents and their kids are paying for their meals. The other that we have is people who want to prevent (disease) in the first place. They truly believe food is medicine, they truly believe that food is what’s going to make the difference to avert disease processes and getting ill, and (to support) increased immune system and control inflammation. Those then tend to be our busy professionals, our busy families. There’s a lot of guilt … (over) way too many drive-thrus, way too much Uber Eats, just grabbing something that they can while they’re sitting at their desk. A lot of guilt comes in and their health is so important to them.

Eric E. Garcia is senior business reporter at the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected]. 

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