Real Food Works: healthy meals subscription service launches, led by tech scene veteran Lucinda Duncalfe

After two decades in the tech startup world, serial entrepreneur Lucinda Duncalfe just might have launched her last company: Real Food Works.

Duncalfe has been a player in Philly’s tech scene since its infancy.

In the 90s, she was the product management director at the legendary infotech company Infonautics. She went on to co-found the anti-spam business TurnTide with David Brussin (before his Monetate days) and Josh Kopelman (before his First Round Capital days) and sold it to Symantec for $28 million. Duncalfe, whose most recent company was paid search engine ClickEquations, also sits on the board of Monetate.

But enough about her storied history, here’s the deal with Real Food Works.

It’s essentially a healthy meal subscription service. The company hopes to make eating healthy easier by working with local chefs who help craft the menu and cook the dishes and then delivering the food to your doorstep.

The startup puts a big emphasis on a plant-based diet, though it says it will expand to accommodate meat eaters.

Duncalfe says she was inspired to create the company after she tried a plant-based diet but found it too inconvenient to keep up.

Real Food Works, with its team of six full-time employees and three part-timers, is currently located in Monetate’s office in Conshohocken but is looking for a more permanent location. Duncalfe says though she’d like to be in Philly, Conshocken would be more convenient because the company has customers in the city and the suburbs.

In the fall, Duncalfe says the startup will raise its first outside capital and launch a marketing campaign.

Duncalfe, 49, lives outside the city in Lafayette Hill. She says she hopes Real Food Works is her last company — and that she hopes, too, that she’ll be running it for many years to come.