Most kids spent the end of their summer vacation trying to pick the perfect lunchbox. Blake and Lucy Licata turned theirs into a blossoming business.
While classmates were trying to decide between glossy pictures of Justin Bieber or Justin Timberlake (it’s J.T. – duh!), Blake and Lucy were drawing up a business plan and crafting an official logo.
And what started as a weekend lemonade stand on a quiet Concord street has quickly mushroomed into a healthy lunch project called Blake and Lucy’s Lunchbox that has already been adopted by one local school.
Blake and Lucy went from selling lemonade to offering health-conscious brown-bag lunches at Newbury Harbor throughout the summer to supplying the Shaker Road School in Concord with roughly 80 lunches per week, featuring chicken salad or turkey sandwiches, apple slices or baby carrots, veggie straws or White Mountain Kettle Corn, and a chocolate chip cookie.
“Parents love it, and of course, it’s kid-tested and created,” said Amy Licata, Blake and Lucy’s mom. “It’s a good lunch. For families, it’s so nice to know you don’t have to worry about packing one. You know they are going to eat a fresh, healthy lunch.”
The chicken salad and turkey sandwiches are prepared at Blake’s All-Natural Foods, a family-owned business for more than five decades in Concord that sells products to outlets like Whole Foods in 48 states. But much of the packing – and almost all of the planning – has been done by Blake and Lucy, who had to approach the board of selectmen for approval in Newbury and designed their own logo, which is affixed to each brown bag lunch served at Shaker Road School. The 10-year-old twins are literally the faces of their franchise – the bags boast a sticker of a bespectacled Blake and pig-tailed Lucy, both rocking classic white chef hats.
“Before we started doing the lunchbox, we loved doing the lemonade stand, but we wanted to do it every weekend and also sell more than just lemonade,” Blake said.
“Someone said, this is great, you should make a business out of this or something,” Lucy added.
So they did. They spent some time kicking ideas around with their parents, and a plan was hatched – they’ve spent the past few summers selling the bagged lunches at Newbury Harbor on summer weekends, usually selling out of the roughly 60 lunches they would bring between the hours of 11 a.m. and about 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The focus has always been on fresh and healthy food, and they further tapped into their entrepreneurial spirit with the most recent venture, which has started with the Shaker Road School.
If the girls and Amy have anything to say about it, though, it certainly won’t stop there.
“We could do a few more schools. Our goal is to get into the schools where these guys go (in Hopkinton),” said Amy, who packs up the majority of the lunches now that the girls are back in school. “I think it would be awesome if one day a week at whatever school it is, they offered Blake and Lucy’s Lunchbox.”
Shaker Road School is currently offering the lunches as options on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with chicken salad sandwiches the main entree on Tuesdays and turkey sandwiches highlighting the meal on Thursdays. The school didn’t previously have a hot lunch program, so the opportunity to provide a local, healthy option was appealing, Amy said. It probably didn’t hurt that the business is being run by a pair of CEO’s – cute enterprising optimists.
“I thought it would get this big someday, but I didn’t think it would happen this fast,” Lucy admitted.
And boy did it happen fast – Google would be jealous of Blake and Lucy’s meteoric rise. They started by selling lemonade, cookies and popsicles outside of Blake’s Turkey Farm, site of Blake’s All-Natural Foods. Things really took off when the girls received an ice cream cart as a birthday present and, after a chat with mom and dad, came up with the idea of selling full lunches in Newbury during the busy summer months.
Perhaps the first signs the business would be a success came when they attended a town selectmen meeting seeking a permit and arrived with sandwiches for each member of the board. The vote was, not surprisingly, immediate and unanimous.
The girls paid for the permit and have since been educated on similar business-related fees, like the monthly trip to the Department of Revenue Administration to pay the meals tax.
Last year they began offering the lunches to sports teams in Hopkinton, so students could avoid the post-game trip to McDonald’s if they wanted to, and the addition of the Shaker Road School was essentially the inevitable next step.
What’s more, they’ve donated half of all proceeds – the bagged lunches are $5 a pop – to the Molly Fund, in honor of family friends who lost their 6-year-old daughter to cancer. They donated $350 this summer alone and have contributed more than $500 since they opened for business.
“The neatest thing for me watching them is just their commitment. In the summer, they are out there every weekend, and they’re so personable with the customers. They are really passionate about it,” Amy said. “They’ve done everything right along the way. They’ve been along for every step of it, and they’ve learned so much. There’s a lot that goes into starting a little lemonade stand.”
Amy would know, as her father helped kickstart the Blake’s business more than 50 years ago with what essentially amounted to a chicken pot pie stand (eat your heart out, lemonade … that’s the type of idea that makes the Food Snob salivate). He essentially took his grandmother’s recipe, whipped up some pies and began selling them at different locations throughout New Hampshire, Amy said.
He would sell out of a cooler in his van, setting up a sign and running out of pies on most days. Those were the humble beginnings of Blake’s Turkey Farm, a business that has grown to include Amy and her husband, Chris. And when Blake and Lucy were 3 years old, they became the inspiration for a line of organic foods now widely produced by the company.
Now, on the site where a few dozen chicken salad sandwiches are produced for Blake and Lucy’s lunchbox, 24,000 meals are created on a daily basis.
So as slender 10-year-old businesswomen, you could say success is in their skinny genes. And the big picture is always in sight for the fifth-generation food business barons.
“We could get into more schools, get some different variety and different stuff on the menu,” Lucy said.
“I want it to be a restaurant,” said Blake.
