No excuses with The TnT Food Experience

Meal delivery service offers delicious eats and positivity

“Excuses are BS, let’s get better together,” Terrence Taylor said mere moments after we first sat down to chat about food, health, and inspiring change.

Taylor is the man behind The TnT Food Experience, a meal delivery service based out of Charlottetown. It’s been just over a year since The TnT Food Experience launched and its continuous growth suggests Taylor’s ‘no-excuses’ approach to providing time-crunched Islanders with affordable, convenient, and healthy meals is paying off in spades.

Tall and lean, with a giant personality and boundless amounts of energy, Taylor is really a brand unto himself. He says as much himself, explaining that the TnT acronym stands for Terrence n Trendsetters. He emphasizes that the brand is built around three fundamentals – food, fitness, and family.

“Eighty percent of health maintenance is food,” Taylor said. “But you also need to have a strong community supporting you, and that’s where the idea of family comes in.” A blurb on the website sums up how he feels about the importance of fitness: “Do yourself, your family and friends a favour: stay active to stay alive!”

As a former student-athlete turned office-worker, Taylor learned the hard way how a combination of poor eating and sedentary habits can take its toll on the body. “I got fat after I graduated and started working. I gained, like, fifty pounds in six months.”

He eventually found his way back to a healthy lifestyle and diet. From there, he realized he wanted to put his BEd from St Francis Xavier to use by educating people about health from a common sense place. That’s how The TnT Food Experience was born.

Taylor, who is open about his lack of formal culinary training, has been cooking up meals out of the Kirk of St. James Church in Charlottetown and making deliveries twice a week. TnT also branched out to catering and more recently Taylor has partnered with gyms and other retail locations to provide grab-n-go style meal options. Black Bean Sweet Potato Wraps, Mexican Quinoa, and Chicken n’ Veggies are just a few of the items on The TnT menu, with prices ranging from $5.99 to $12.99.

“Every day is nuts. Like every single day,” Taylor said of life as a food entrepreneur. He recently completed Propel ICT’s intense 12-week accelerator program for new startups in the Maritimes. “I’ve been running a business on energy and passion. I learned a lot of solid stuff from the program and (as a result) I’m going to be changing some things up.”

One change that’s already been implemented is a website redesign that makes the on-line ordering experience very user-friendly. “We’ve simplified the meal options and are adding new menu items throughout each month. People can also vote for their favourite dishes and the most popular ones stay in the rotation,” he said.

Through the Propel ICT program, Taylor dug into the data and found that more of his sales were coming from the retail outlets than any other channel. “It’s really reaching those people who will consistently purchase healthy meals in the places they already are, like the gym.”

With this knowledge in hand, Taylor is already diving into what he sees as the obvious next step for The TnT Food Experience – partnering with gyms, sports teams, and schools to bring healthy food to as many Islanders as possible.

A true entrepreneur, his biggest challenge may be that his head is ever full of new ideas for The TnT Food Experience and beyond. “I really want to get into things like pop-up food trucks and long table themed dinners. People don’t eat together anymore and I want to change that.”

Indeed, there is no doubt in my mind that Taylor is not only a trendsetter, but a changemaker that will make a mark on the Island and beyond with his ambitious pursuits and unwavering conviction that we can all do better.

Terrence’s Take
On Moving to Charlottetown
“I grew up in Vegas, but spent the past 11 years in Nova Scotia. I wanted to try somewhere new, but Toronto and Montreal were too big. Small is good, and Charlottetown is like this really dope version of cultured Montreal, but kind of like Vancouver. It’s a hidden gem of Canada. More people are coming here and people are realizing change is not so bad.”

 

On Helping People Get Healthy
“I have this customer who’s an athlete with Type 1 Diabetes. He was able to reduce his insulin injections by 80% after only four weeks of The TnT Food Experience meals.”

 

On His Persona
“I’ve been a nerd all my life. I played basketball because I was good at it, not because I necessarily liked it.”

 

On Excuses
“Everyone makes an excuse about why they don’t eat healthy – ‘It’s expensive, it doesn’t taste good, I don’t have time.’ But seriously, you can either make an excuse or you can just do it.”

 

On Being a Role Model
“I really want to work with youth and I tried to [in education], but it was hard to do anything because of the system. I want for young black and brown boys and girls to be inspired by someone that looks like them that’s not in the entertainment business.”

About Shannon Courtney

Shannon is the co-founder of Salty and was its editor-in-chief for the publication's inaugural year. When she’s not writing about food, Shannon's either cooking, eating, talking, or thinking about it. Her food adventures have included milking a Jersey cow in Australia, almost overdosing on maple syrup in Prince Edward County, and studying local food systems in Vermont as part of her Master’s thesis research. Shannon is also a Registered Holistic Nutritionist and strongly believes you CAN make friends with salad.

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