Restaurants adjust recipes for everyone. Home food doesn't have to.
TrulyServd exists so you can find the people near you who still cook the way families do — and so they can stop selling in the DMs.
Three things we noticed
Simple food got hard to find.
So much of what we eat every day in the US and Canada is mass-produced: long ingredient lists, additives, made to last on a shelf. Bread that's just flour, water and salt, or a stew made from things you can name, has become surprisingly rare.
The food we grew up with went missing.
These are countries of immigrants. Millions of people miss the food they grew up with, cooked the way a mother, an aunt or a neighbour made it. Restaurants adapt those recipes for a broad audience. Home food doesn't have to — and someone a few streets away often still cooks it that way.
The people who make it don't fit a storefront.
Home cooks, bakers and farmers'-market makers can't open a restaurant to sell a few dozen loaves or a weekend batch of dumplings. So they sell through DMs, Facebook groups, Kijiji and word of mouth. The market is real. It's just scattered.
So we put it in one place.
TrulyServd is one place to find them, see exactly what they make and when, order ahead, pick it up from the person who made it, and pay them directly.
From the founder
The longer version.
Travelling through Italy reminded me how normal good food can be: made fresh, from a handful of ingredients, by people who have made it the same way for years. I came home wanting that to be ordinary here too.
But the bigger reason is closer to home. A lot of us miss the food we grew up with. And very often, someone a few streets away still cooks it exactly that way — we just have no way of finding them.
TrulyServd is my attempt to fix that: give those cooks a proper home on the internet, and give the rest of us a way to find them, order ahead and say thank you in person.
— The founder of TrulyServd
What TrulyServd doesn't do
On purpose.
No delivery.
You pick up from the person who made it — at their home, market stall or pop-up. That's how a home kitchen works, and it's how the food reaches you fresh.
No money in the middle.
Buyers pay cooks directly, cash or Interac e-Transfer. Nothing is charged online, and TrulyServd never touches the money.
No address on display.
A cook's exact pickup address is shared only after they accept an order.
No unchecked kitchens.
Every kitchen is reviewed before it goes live, each cook's identity is checked with a government ID and a selfie, and every dish lists its allergens.