About ZenMeals

ZenMeals is a small food startup in Zurich, with an office on Walchestrasse in the heart of the city and a kitchen in Kreis 6. We cook two whole-food meals, the Super Veggie and the Nutty Pudding, inspired by Bryan Johnson's Blueprint protocol (we're not affiliated with either), and deliver them fresh every week. Every nutrition claim on this site links to a real published study, not a marketing line — because we'd rather show our work than ask you to trust us.

Who started ZenMeals

My name is Matthias Sala. I'm a software engineer by training, not a nutritionist and not a chef. I have three kids, a family of five, and for years I was seeking healthy habits in a world of unhealthy temptations and choices, trying to eat well without anyone at the table starving on a Tuesday night. When Bryan Johnson's Blueprint protocol made the idea of one nutrient-dense meal, built almost entirely from whole plants, popular, I started cooking a version of it at home.

The recipe wasn't the hard part. The time was. A proper Super Veggie means real prep and real cleanup, and most weeknights I didn't have a free hour to spare. So I built ZenMeals to solve that for my own family first: the same kind of meal (legumes, cruciferous vegetables, healthy fats, barely any processing), ready to eat in under two minutes. ZenMeals is not affiliated with Bryan Johnson or Blueprint. We're an independent company in Zurich, and we build our own recipes on the same published science he popularized.

Why you should trust what we say

We don't have nutrition credentials, and we're not going to pretend we do. What we do instead: every nutrition claim on this site links to the actual paper behind it, usually a meta-analysis or systematic review rather than one small study, so you can check it yourself. Our research page lists the evidence behind every ingredient we chose, from the fibre in the Super Veggie to the flaxseed in the Nutty Pudding. If you ever find a claim on this site that isn't backed by a source, tell us. We'll fix it.

How we make the food

We cook once a week, fresh, in a small production kitchen in Kreis 6 — no dining room, just a kitchen built for one job: getting food from raw ingredients into your fridge as fast as quality allows. We don't batch-cook a month's worth and freeze it. What you eat on Thursday was made a couple of days earlier, not months earlier. Meals arrive chilled, and reheating takes under two minutes. That's the only cooking step left in your evening.

Where the ingredients come from

Our ingredients are organic. That's a sourcing standard, not a health claim on its own. Organic tells you how something was grown, not automatically how nutritious it is. But it's the bar we hold our suppliers to. Delivery is within Zurich, and shipping is free.

How we choose ingredients

We build meals around whole foods and try to stay out of the ingredient list's way: black lentils instead of a protein-isolate powder, actual broccoli and cauliflower instead of a "vegetable blend," real extra virgin olive oil instead of a cheap seed-oil mix. A few rules we hold ourselves to:

• Legumes over protein powder, where we can. Black lentils give you protein, fibre, and micronutrients together — a scoop of isolate can't do that.
• Cruciferous vegetables, cooked gently. Broccoli and cauliflower are in the Super Veggie for their sulforaphane precursors, not just their fibre.
• Extra virgin olive oil as our main fat. Of every oil we looked at, it has the strongest evidence behind it.
• Nuts and seeds, mostly unroasted. Macadamia, walnuts, and flaxseed bring healthy fats and lignans to the Nutty Pudding.
• No added sugar. Sweetness in the Nutty Pudding comes from real fruit — berries, cherries, pomegranate juice — never syrup.
• Keep it simple. If an ingredient needs a chemistry degree to explain, it's probably not in our kitchen.

How we use the research we cite

Every citation on this site links to the actual paper, on PubMed or by DOI, never a blog post summarizing one and never a supplement company's press release. We favour meta-analyses and systematic reviews over single studies where they exist, because one trial can be an outlier and a synthesis of dozens usually isn't. We never claim a meal "cures" or "prevents" anything. We tell you what the evidence shows about a class of ingredient (fibre, legumes, polyphenols) and let you draw your own conclusions. See the full list on research, or the numbers per meal on nutrition information.

Where to go next

Read how ZenMeals works to see what delivery actually looks like week to week, or browse serving ideas for ways to make the meals your own. To order, go straight to the Super Veggie and Nutty Pudding subscription. For your team, see ZenMeals for companies. If you have a question, contact us — we read every message ourselves.