Tocabe Expands With Line of Native-Made Frozen Meals

"It's been a long time coming, and prepared meals were always in the conversation," says Ben Jacobs, co-owner of Tocabe: An American Indian Eatery.

In 2021, he and co-owner Matt Chandra launched Tocabe Indigenous Marketplace, which made native foods such as Navajo blue corn meal, Ziibimijwang Farm maple syrup, Canadian Lake Harvest wild rice, Séka Hills elderberry balsamic vinegar and more available nationwide.

Last month, they added Harvest Meals to the mix in order to bring the food served at their brick-and-mortar restaurants to tables across the country. "We wanted to get the meals into 48 of the states, and with logistics, that took two years," Jacobs notes.  The team first started talking about shipping prepared food back in April 2020. The idea, says Jacobs, is to expand sales so the supply chain they have developed reaches farther. More meals means more money to the native farmers and producers, which in turn works to not only aid in land revitalization, but also to support both the families growing and raising the products and the Native community.

"It's Native-first in what we represent, but it's open and available and developed for everyone to enjoy," says Jacobs. "I think we should all be eating it, because it supports an America food system."

Right now, some of the items in the Harvest Meal lineup include bison chipotle chili; a bison bowl with black beans, wheatberry, white tepary beans, green chilies and roasted squash; green chile stew with beef; and the vegan posu bowl with Red Lake Nation wild rice, roasted purple sweet potato, white beans, fire-roasted corn and squash purée. Each costs between $10.99 and $15.99, and can be ordered online with free shipping for home delivery.  Getting into the packaged-meal scene was the next logical step for Tocabe, which started as a restaurant in the Berkeley neighborhood in 2008 and has grown into an online marketplace, catering company and, now, a meal-service company. Before launching Harvest Meals, Tocabe also began providing prepared meals to people in North Dakota's Spirit Lakes Nation through its Direct-to-Tribe Ready Meal Program in early 2023.

"We are working to continue to build the partnerships, as Tocabe is about community-based accessibility," says Jacobs. "The meals we give to the tribal communities are exactly the same meals we sell: Everyone gets the same food."

He adds: "Big companies — their goal is to sell as much food as possible, but they just want to turn a profit. We want to turn a profit and make money, too, because then I can go back to the producer and say, 'We got 20,000 pounds of buffalo; now we need 50,000 pounds.'"

If Tocabe managed to take even 1 percent of the delivered packaged food market, that would make a huge impact on the company and the people it supports. The business also offers one of, if not the only, meal services featuring 90 percent local ingredients. Many of the popular services that deliver pre-made meals, be that Factor, Daily Harvest or Cook Unity, don't look toward American farms and ranches, often getting food from other countries to keep costs low.  "We want to put hard-to-find, high-quality ingredients into people's lives," says Jacobs. "It goes back to how Tocabe started, and a lot of what we cook and what we put into meals are time-consuming to make."

For example, he adds, the tepary bean is a highly nutritious desert bean that has more dietary fiber than most foods, but it also takes eight hours to prepare. The braised bison Tocabe is famous for is slow-cooked for 24 hours.

"We want to embrace your busy lifestyle. We want to help your busy lifestyle," Jacobs says, adding that he has four kids and understands just how chaotic daily life can get. "We can make really good food just as convenient [as fast food], but give people nutritious things that aren't heavily processed."

Beyond Tocabe and its many endeavors, Jacobs also weighs in on food and nutrition while serving on President Joe Biden's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. All of this, he says, is to support people in the healthiest way possible.

"It's seed to the soul, from the picking, the harvesting — everything needs to be part of it," he concludes. "That's our philosophy, and you can grow something amazing through putting people first."