Life, Values & Legacy: Our Chat with Matthew McComb of Williamstown, New Jersey 08094

Matthew McComb shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Matthew, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What do you think is misunderstood about your business? 
Most people think a personal chef just “comes over and cooks.” They picture a nice dinner, maybe a little meal prep, and that’s the whole story.
What they don’t see is that this business is really logistics, systems, and precision disguised as food.

Behind every meal I cook, there’s sourcing, timing, dietary strategy, macros, travel, equipment, communication, scheduling, shopping, and building a menu that fits a client’s lifestyle, not just their taste buds. I’m essentially running a miniature restaurant, nutrition program, and concierge service inside someone’s home — without the staff, the dish pit, or the margin of error a restaurant gets.

People also underestimate the scale. I’m not just cooking for one household — I’m building a multi-city operation, training chefs, managing high-performance clients, developing menus that fit everything from athletes to families to medical conditions, and expanding into retail, media, and consulting. It’s a chef empire in motion, not just a “come cook for me” gig.

The biggest misunderstanding?
That this is a side hustle.
It’s not.
It’s a full-blown, high-level, high-pressure enterprise that takes creativity, discipline, and business strategy to run well. And I love every part of it!

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Chef Matt McComb, founder of Chef Matt’s Culinary Creations, a personal-chef company built around one core idea: high-quality, scratch-made daily or weekly meal prep that tastes incredible and actually fits people’s real lives.

Most meal prep companies chase volume. I chase precision — real cooking, real ingredients, and meals designed for families, busy professionals, and anyone who wants flavor without the chaos of cooking every night. Every menu is custom-buil, or selected from our rotating menu: fresh proteins, clean sides, gluten-sensitive when needed, and absolutely everything made from scratch (right down to sauces and dressings). No shortcuts, no processed fillers, no reheated “factory meal prep.”

I started this business because people were constantly asking why nobody could make healthy food that actually tasted like something you’d look forward to eating. So that became the mission: restaurant-quality meals prepared in your home, tailored to your dietary needs, lifestyle, and preferences.

What makes my brand unique is the level of intention behind it. I treat meal prep like a craft — dialing in flavor, variety, macros, and consistency every single week. Clients rely on us not just for convenience, but because the food genuinely makes their lives easier and better.

Right now, we’re focused on expanding this service, refining our systems, and serving more households who want a chef-level meal prep experience instead of the typical “plastic container meal.” It’s personal, it’s high-touch, and it’s built around quality first.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
The part of me that needs to be released is the version of myself that tried to do everything alone — the chef who believed working harder was the only way forward. That mindset got me here, but it can’t take me where I’m going.

When you’re building a meal-prep business at a high level, there’s a point where hustle isn’t strategy anymore. The “just grind it out” version of me served its purpose in the beginning: it taught me discipline, resilience, and how to execute under pressure. But holding onto that identity now only creates bottlenecks. It limits growth, limits creativity, and limits the level of service I can deliver.

What I’m stepping into instead is a more deliberate, structured version of myself — the chef who delegates, who builds systems, who trains others, and who focuses on vision over survival mode. I’m replacing brute force with scalability. That shift isn’t always comfortable, but it’s necessary.

So the part of me I’m releasing is the lone-wolf chef.
The part I’m embracing is the leader and builder — the one who can take this meal-prep service to its next level.

When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
For me, that shift happened when I finally stopped pretending that celiac disease and my detour into real estate were just inconveniences — and realized they were actually the two things that taught me how to rebuild myself.

When I was first diagnosed with celiac, the kitchen went from being my safe place to the one place that could actually hurt me. That’s a strange feeling for a chef — realizing the thing you love can take you down if you’re not meticulous. I hid that for a long time because chefs aren’t supposed to show weakness. We’re supposed to be bulletproof.
But the truth is, celiac forced me to cook differently. It forced precision. It forced creativity. It forced me to master gluten-free cooking at a level most chefs don’t even think about. What used to feel like a limitation eventually became one of the most powerful parts of my craft.

Real estate was another curveball. I left the kitchen trying to fix burnout, trying to find a new path — but in the process, I discovered something I never would’ve learned inside a restaurant: how to sell, how to communicate, how to build relationships, how to think like a business owner. At first, I treated that whole chapter like a mistake. I didn’t want to talk about it. But when I finally accepted it as part of the story, everything clicked.
The customer service, the negotiation skills, the mindset — it’s all the backbone of how I run my meal prep business today.

I stopped hiding the pain when I realized it wasn’t baggage. It was leverage.
Celiac made me a sharper cook.
Real estate made me a smarter entrepreneur.
Together, they’re the reason Chef Matt’s Meal Prep exists at the level it does.

Pain stopped being something to cover up the moment I started using it as a blueprint.

So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. Is the public version of you the real you?
For the most part, yes — but the public version of me is the polished version. The real me is the same guy, just without the apron perfectly tied and the lighting set up.

What people see — the chef who’s dialed in, intentional, disciplined, and obsessed with doing things the right way — that’s real. I don’t put on a persona to sell meal prep. I don’t fake passion for food. I don’t pretend to care about clients’ needs; I actually do.

What the public doesn’t always see are the miles that got me here.
The celiac diagnosis that forced me to relearn my craft from scratch.
The years in real estate where I had to figure out who I was outside the kitchen.
The burnout, the pivots, the long nights trying to build something stable out of nothing.
Those aren’t “Instagram moments,” but they’re the parts that shaped me.

So yes — the public version is me.
But it’s the me who’s already done the work.
The me who’s sharpened by mistakes.
The me who shows up ready because I’ve lived the parts nobody sees.

If anything, the private version of me is less filtered — a little funnier, a little rougher around the edges, and a lot more focused on the mission than the spotlight. But the core? The values? The way I treat people and the standards I hold in the kitchen?

That’s exactly the same, publicly or privately.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. When have you had to bet the company?
Right now.
This exact season.

I’m in the middle of the biggest shift my business has ever taken — expanding our offerings, investing heavily back into the company, and building systems that make the meal-prep experience smoother, fresher, and more consistent for every client we serve. It’s a full evolution, not an upgrade.

On paper, it looks like growth.
Behind the scenes, it’s a bet.

I’m pouring time, money, energy, and focus into infrastructure the public doesn’t see yet:
better processes, better training, better logistics, better client experience, better everything. It’s not the kind of investment that pays off tomorrow. It’s the kind that pays off if you trust the vision enough to keep going even when it feels uncomfortable.

This is the moment where I’m choosing long-term impact over short-term comfort.
I’m scaling the right way — with intention, not chaos.
And yes, it’s a risk.
But every true level-up is.

To get our meal-prep service where I know it can go, I had to stop thinking like a single chef and start thinking like a company — one with standards, systems, and real structure behind it. That shift requires betting big. It requires saying, “We’re building something better, even if it costs more now.”

So when have I had to bet the company?
Right now.
And I’m doing it because I believe our clients deserve the best version of what we can do — not just today, but for years to come.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Chef Matts Culinary Creations LLC

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