Mimi Tolkin

After a career teaching elementary and middle school, raising four daughters, and a type 1 diabetes diagnosis, my husband Matt and I decided to also join forces professionally to bring better food to schoolchildren. So, drawing on his extensive experience in food and hospitality, and mine in education, management/customer service, and marketing, we went into business for ourselves over a decade ago. For 11 years we were a fresh school lunch catering company, bringing fresh, nutritious, kid-friendly meals everywhere kids learned. At our peak we were preparing and delivering nearly 100 meals daily. And as if that didn't keep us busy enough, a few years into that we decided adults need fresh, convenient meals too so we launched a second company, Righteous Kitchen, to bring fresh ready-made meals to the masses. Righteous Kitchen makes everything fresh and everything from scratch. It's quite a busy kitchen! Within a year of that COVID closed down the world as we knew it and all business dried up. But one things entrepreneurs are is scrappy, so we persevered. We were able to raise enough funds throughout COVID to not only keep our team employed but we provided over 7,000 free, ready-made meals to healthcare, hospital, and nursing home workers throughout Chicago. This campaign, called Feed the Frontline, afforded us the experience of perfecting our ready-made meal process. An unexpected consequence was that it garnered considerable press coverage which drew attention to our brand. Both things combined allowed us to expand to the point of building out a new commissary kitchen and local grab & go store in our own neighborhood. In 2025 Righteous Kitchen's fresh grab and go store was booming, corporate and local catering was expanding, and we were still serving well over 600 fresh, handmade lunches daily to school children. We needed to reign it in a little and focus entirely on one aspect of our business, so last fall we sold our school lunch contracts, thereby freeing us up to expand Righteous Kitchen even further. In March 2026 we are opening a second location of Righteous Kitchen in the Chicago French Market at Ogilvie Transportation Center. And the best part, for us, is that our oldest daughter who was in the grade school when we first set out on this entrepreneurial path, will now be managing our new location for us! We can't wait to see what's next for our family business!