2025 Orders are Open!

Happy New Year! 

We hope you’ve had a lovely holiday season, and enjoyed the first few days of 2025! We’ve been tinkering on our store and have plenty of updates for you, so read on to find out what’s new, and get your orders in quick! Our first delivery day this year is this coming week on Tuesday 7th January.

New Boxes Available! 

Chef Solo
Highly requested, we finally have a box with single portions! Cook 4 different recipes with just 1 portion of each. Choose your recipes weekly, or just go with the flow.

Allium-Free Box
An easy-prep, 1 recipe, 2-4 portion box for people with Allium allergies or aversions. Subscribe and your order will always be the Allium-Free option of the week without having to ask! Common alliums are onions, garlic, chives, and leeks.

Existing Box Changes 📦

We’ve changed our preset boxes Self Love and Couple Goals to 4 Recipes
This is for a number of reasons, but the most important was our concern that many people were not getting through all their meals in time. We were getting requests for old Recipe Cards, well past the best before dates of the ingredients supplied. We want people to be eating our food as fresh as possible, and don’t want anyone to get sick. Our food does not contain added preservatives (like most store-bought jarred sauces) so has to be eaten as soon as possible, and definitely within 7 days of being made. We were also getting more inquiries about 4-Recipe boxes - previously they were only available in the Box Creator area. The pricing has been adjusted accordingly to make more sense for fewer meals. Please let us know if you’re still interested in ordering 5 meals a week - if there’s enough demand we can figure out a solution!

New 48 hour cut-off time! ⏳

Life = chaos. We get it!
We’ve slightly altered how we process orders to make it less likely that you'll miss out. You now only need to make your order at least 48 hours ahead of your delivery day.
Cut off times for each delivery day are:
- Midnight Saturday night for Tuesday deliveries*
- Midnight Monday night for Thursday deliveries
- Midnight Wednesday night for a Saturday deliveries
*Late order requests will still usually be possible, especially for Tuesdays as we won’t process orders until Sunday afternoon. It just depends on timing and existing orders, so please just email us if you’re ever late and we will always try our best!

Different Delivery Days & Zones 🚗

To start off in 2025, deliveries will just be on 3 days:
Tuesdays - Wellington, Lower Hutt, Upper Hutt, Wainuiomata, Horokiwi*
Thursdays - Wellington & Porirua to Paraparaumu
and Saturdays - just Wellington region
Our Delivery Map area is still the same, just the days have changed.
It’s always a bit quiet in January, so too many delivery days doesn’t work out at first. Once order numbers increase, we will recommence Wednesday and/or Friday deliveries.
We were stretching everything too thinly last year, to the point where some days we had 40 deliveries, and others just 5-10. This wasn’t really sustainable for a small business batch-cooking food for delivery - it takes a lot less time per portion to cook and pack 80 portions than it does 20! So we’re just trying to be smarter with our time management, while still offering multiple days.
*Delivery Zones: It’s very likely that we will change the delivery zones again when we add more delivery days - most probably we will move Upper Hutt/Wainuiomata/Horokiwi to Wednesday or Friday. We will make sure to put a newsletter out when that happens and will update the website promptly!

$5 Delivery Fee & Pricing Changes ⚖️

We’ve added a $5 delivery fee for all orders
Instead of increasing all our prices by a specific percent this year, we’ve instead implemented a store-wide $5 delivery fee. Some meal box prices have changed to accommodate this so it’s not a dramatic increase per meal. Per meal, it’s still much cheaper to buy a bigger box with more meals! We just needed to balance the pricing out, as some of it was too low for the actual box cost, and to reflect increased wages and other costs, and this seemed like the fairest way to accomplish this. If you’re interested in how much the boxes cost, per meal or box, both with and without the delivery fee, and what our logic is behind any unusual changes is, click here for a little spreadsheet!

New Subscription System ♻️

We’ve changed our subscription service provider to one that seems to offer a better system for both you and us! The most obvious thing that is better about this service for customers is that you can now skip specific weeks of your subscription in advance, not just the next order! Other benefits are that it’s generally easier to manage from both our end and yours. Let us know how you get on with it and please report any issues if you come across them! We’ve updated our Subscription Info page with new instructions on how to do all things subscription-related.

Shelly Bay Bread 🍞

We loved having Shelly Bay Bread for sale on our shop! Sadly the weekly bread orders were too low to continue having it always available
To get their lovely loaves at wholesale price, we had to order a minimum of $40 (excl. GST) of bread per each delivery, which was a fairly low amount. However, this meant that we had to have buns on the menu every week, to make it possible for us to order bread loaves on the correct delivery days for customers (and we often only had 2-3 loaf orders come in each week). Add that to the lower order numbers for some delivery days, and it just literally wasn’t adding up. However, we will still be using their bread in our menu occasionally, just not every week. When bread is part of the menu, we will temporarily reopen bread loaf orders in our Pantry Shop for that week’s deliveries! Make sure to check the Menu Calendar and follow us on social media to find out when bread is back.

Meanwhile, check out what IS on the menu next week below:

Menu for Week 1 of 2025 🍲

Recipe 1: Recipe 1: Souvlaki Tofu Bowl
with Bulgur Wheat, Greek Salad & Pickled Red Onions

Recipe 2: Lentil & Mushroom Spaghetti Bolognese
with Toasted Seeds & Parmesan Crumb

Recipe 3: Baked Zucchini & Chickpea Pilaf
with fresh Salad, Coriander Dressing, & Roasted Cashews

Recipe 4: Miso & Sesame Soba Noodle Salad
with Edamame Beans, Pickled Vegetables & Roasted Peanuts

Recipe 5: Brown Rice & Butter Bean Nourish Bowl (Allium-Free)
with a Fresh Crunchy Veg & Lime & Mint Dressing

Click here for more Menu information

Thank you for being a part of our Zero Waste mission! If you have any questions or feedback please don’t hesitate to contact us - we love hearing from you!

We’re looking forward to kicking off 2025 with a bang.. and we have more exciting news to come very soon! See you next week!👩🏼‍🍳

Ngā Mihi Nui, Ottilie & the Yum Jar team 💚

2024 Sustainability Stats ✨

Boxes Delivered: 3,891 | Meals Made Zero Waste: 29,682 | Jars Reused: 103,887
Equivalent total glass diverted from waste streams 2020-24: 126.5 Tonnes! 🏋️‍♀️