Chef Arielle Adams grows meal-prep service at Mountain Harvest Kitchen

Chef Arielle Adams is carving out space for fresh, chef-crafted meals in Unicoi County, partnering with Mountain Harvest Kitchen to meet the needs of busy families.Her business, built from years of training, is growing inside the region's shared commercial kitchen. Adams described her service as "a high-end private chef and meal prep service," one she hopes to expand while keeping quality and accessibility linked.Adams explained that her service combines high-end cooking with accessibility for the community."We are hoping to expand to meet more people and make it more accessible," she said. "The mission is really providing food at an accessible level for our community. We have a stigma in our society that to be healthy is to not be appetizing, and I think that there is so much that we can do with food that keeps it fresh and nutritious."She said her meal prep clients tend to be people who want to eat well but lack the time to cook, or who navigate allergies and dietary restrictions that make eating out difficult. Alongside weekly meals, she also handles special-event catering."We deal with a lot of allergies and dietary restrictions, so being able to provide food for people that may not typically be able to go out to eat means a lot," she said. "We do a lot of gluten-free, low carb and other lifestyle meals."She said the foundation of her business began long before moving to Unicoi County. Adams studied at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, a place she remembers as "a very inspirational space."She said that experience shaped her skill set and passion, but her direction shifted after graduation when her mother became seriously ill. That period, she explained, opened her eyes to food's restorative potential."It kind of opened my eyes to the idea of food being more for healing and not just for taste," she said.Designing anti-inflammatory menus for her mother eventually led her toward nutrition-minded cooking for others. When she launched her business during COVID-19, she said she found that her mom's challenges reflected a broader need."Most of the people that came to me were having dietary restrictions or specific goals," she said. "It made me realize that my mom's situation wasn't unique."Adams moved to Tennessee with her husband, a disabled veteran, after living in Florida and working in catering for Disney. They wanted to be near family and fell in love with the region's landscape and agricultural roots."We found Johnson City, Unicoi and this whole region, and were just very enamored with the people and the nature," she said, noting the climate and the availability of local growers sealed the decision.Today her business is a small family operation. Her husband handles management and computer-based tasks, while her younger brother prepares some of the food inside Mountain Harvest Kitchen."He has just done a phenomenal job," she said. "It's been really fun and really challenging to pour all of the experience and recipes that are in my brain into him."Mountain Harvest Kitchen, she said, allowed her business to expand without overwhelming financial risk."It gave us space to grow without as much risk and really gave us a home base," she said.She noted that starting a business organically comes with "funky growth," and the kitchen's infrastructure and inspections have made it possible to reach more people."I don't know that we would have been able to grow as much as we have," she said.Adams said her long-term plans include broadening her client base without losing the personalization that defines her meals."Every client has a menu that is just for them," she said, though that level of customization limits how many families she can take on.She said she hopes a new website with online ordering will help close the gap and make healthy meals available to more households.For the holidays, Adams is offering Thanksgiving sides prepared from scratch, using organic ingredients when possible. She expects to offer a similar menu at Christmas.At the heart of everything, Adams said she wants her business to remove stress."We're taking the guesswork out," she said. "It's about providing healthy, wholesome real food so people can achieve their career goals, their family goals or their health goals and still have time for all of that."More information is available at chefarielleadams.com.