Keeney's Kitchen Is Feeding Chillicothe One Prepped Meal at a Time

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CHILLICOTHE, Ohio: The meals at Keeney’s Kitchen in Chillicothe are not cooked in Chillicothe. Every one of them is made fresh at the company’s kitchen in Lucasville and delivered to the stores, where the whole model is grab-and-go: walk in, pick your meals, and dinner for the week is handled.

Owner Matt Keeney says that is by design. He ran a gym for years and kept watching the same pattern: people would work hard in the gym, then eat gas station food on the way home. “Nutrition was the missing piece,” he said. He started cooking out of a borrowed kitchen in November 2020 and never looked back. The business now runs grab-and-go stores in Chillicothe, Jackson, Wheelersburg, Ironton, and Ashland, Ky., all fed by the Lucasville kitchen.

The mission, in his words: “Defeat diabetes. Medicine begins at the end of your fork. Rather than treating diabetes with insulin for life, I empower customers with fuel that has the opportunity to reduce and defeat diabetes and lower A1C levels.”

Meal prep is still a new idea for a lot of Ross County shoppers, so here is how it works at Keeney’s: the Lucasville kitchen cooks everything fresh, the meals are trucked to the stores, and there is no cooking on site. Customers stock up on ready-to-heat meals built around the eating plan they are trying to follow, instead of cooking every night or hitting a drive-thru.

The current best sellers, according to Keeney: Muscle Bytes, Chicken Tacos, the Big Mac Bowl, Beef Taco Casserole, and Asian Turkey Meatballs.

The footprint keeps growing, too. Keeney says a seventh store opens November 1 in Gallipolis, the latest step in a run that started with one borrowed kitchen six years ago.

Photos courtesy of Keeney’s Kitchen.

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