Healthy food delivered

FORT WALTON BEACH — If you like to eat healthy, there’s a new option in town to help you achieve healthy meals for yourself and your family in mere minutes: Healthy Coast Meals.

Ashley Cronley and her boyfriend Ross Cole recently opened the prepared meal business in Uptown Station.

“We take the work out of meal prepping and do it all for you,” Cronley said. “We use all fresh, natural, whole ingredients which we take and make into fully cooked meals. Then, it’s there in your refrigerator so you don’t have to do anything; just pop it in the microwave and its ready in two minutes.”

Cronley said the idea for the business came from her own lifestyle.

“I was diagnosed with a disease much like Crohn’s disease, and so I had to eat specifically for health reasons,” she said. “It taught me that you can control a lot of disease states just by what you eat.”

With the motto, “Clean eating made simple on the Emerald Coast,” Cronley said she hopes the area will embrace the healthy lifestyle that has helped her overcome so much in her own life.

“I stay away from the word diet. ... It’s a lifestyle,” she said. “When you eat healthy, clean, whole foods, you feel better.”

As for the process, Healthy Coast Meals works on an online ordering system. Meals are prepared weekly in the prep kitchen in Fort Walton Beach and then delivered every Monday to customers' homes or chosen delivery locations from Navarre to Panama City. Meals are kept in an industrial walk-in refrigerator until delivery and then packed into insulated coolers on ice on delivery day.

“Customers can go online and place their orders before 3 p.m. Thursday for the following week,” Cronley said.

HealthyCoast Meals posts weekly menus online, and each meal is packaged in a single-serving, microwave-safe plastic container. Customers can choose between two meal styles: Clean and Lean or Healthy Gourmet. They can even customize their meals by likes, dislikes and allergies.

“The Clean and Lean meals offer one all natural protein, one complex carbohydrate and one vegetable,” Cronley said. “The Healthy Gourmet meals are like a healthy version of what you like to eat in a restaurant. It’s more like a dish.”

In addition to the fresh, natural ingredient model, Cronley said everything she makes is gluten free, no sugar added and never frozen.  

“I am very picky when it comes to what we use in our meals,” she said. “I’m not going to feed you something I wouldn’t eat myself. This whole thing is my passion; I’ll do anything to help people eat healthier and feel better.”

As for cost, the a la carte option meals range in price from $11 to $12.50 and the meal packages begin at $53 for five meals a week.

Healthy Coast Meals is at 98 Eglin Parkway, Suite 8, in Fort Walton Beach. To order food or learn more, visit www.healthycoastmeals.com or call 850-496-6470.