After five years of selling homemade frozen meals first through delivery and then at local markets, a central Pennsylvania small business is getting ready to open its first storefront in State College.
Owner Kathey Fisher is hoping to open Kathryn’s new shop at 1665 S. Atherton St. “within a couple weeks,” she told StateCollege.com. The location, behind IHOP, was previously home to Brewsky’s Bottle Shop.
Kathryn’s specializes in meals that Fisher described as comfort food, drawing on recipes handed down from her mother and grandmother. It offers frozen, family-size trays of main dishes like lasagna, baked mac and cheese, beef stroganoff, breakfast hash and cheddar biscuit chicken casserole, to name a few, as well as soups, vegetables and other sides and desserts.
“It’s kind of an old-fashioned style, if you will, which is comforting,” Fisher said. “You’ve got your chicken noodle soup and you’ve got your lasagna, mac and cheese, meatballs, …things people are all familiar with. It’s just down to earth kind of food.”
The meals are inspired by the Pennsylvania Dutch style of cooking, which Fisher said is best illustrated by the ham balls (ham loaf rolled into balls) with sweet and sour sauce.
“It leans toward the PA Dutch style of cooking,” Fisher said. “Ham balls is probably one of the best things to describe PA Dutch cooking. Ham balls, I have found, some people are just like ‘What is that?’ Ham balls is known to be a central PA item and part of that PA Dutch cooking comes in the ham balls.”
When it does open, the new store’s hours will be 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. Though that may expand in the future, Fisher said the reason for being open two days is because the rest of the week she is using the shop for production.
While the store will have no seating, largely because most of the products are frozen and meant to be taken home, Fisher plans to sell grab-and-go items such as prepared salads and chicken salad. Kathryn’s also will be offering Friday dinners — hot meals for one to go.
“This allows people to try the meals that we have frozen before they go all in and buy a whole lasagna,” Fisher said. “This kind of gives people the opportunity to taste test, as well as there are people who just want to have a meal hot and ready to go.”
The store also will offer coffee to go along with what Fisher called Kathryn’s signature item: fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.
When Fisher started bringing her frozen meals to local farmers markets, she also sold the cinnamon rolls “as a way to draw people in.”
“They’re just a hot seller,” she said. “When we were at our market stand it helped to have something at the stand to see and grab. We will have them baked fresh. I’m sure it will be a hit because there’s nothing better than a warm cinnamon roll.”
Kathryn’s was born out of Fisher’s experience with her own family. She’d make meals in advance for her, her husband and their four kids to have ready in the freezer for later, then friends began paying her to cook extra for them.
“It’s a problem for everybody when you’re working and you have to cook dinner,” Fisher said. “So I had a few friends I was doing that for before the business ever started, which is kind of where the vision took off.”
In 2020, she decided to quit her part-time job and go all in on making it a business. When COVID hit, Fisher though she would have to hold off on starting, but her mentor from from SCORE, the nonprofit association that provides free start-up services to aspiring small business owners, suggested she had an opportunity to make it a delivery service.
Fisher rented a vacant restaurant property near her home in Mifflintown to use as a production space, set up a website and started Kathryn’s as a frozen meal delivery business. It was a success, and Fisher believed it would work in the State College area, so she became a vendor at the Boalsburg and North Atherton Street farmers markets.
Kathryn’s no longer does delivery, but has, and will continue to have, products available at Centre Markets in the Nittany Mall and Mexico Market in Port Royal, as well as at the two farmers markets.
Fisher said she believes the appeal of Kathryn’s is being able to provide a home-cooked meal for yourself and your family, even when you can’t make it yourself.
“I like to tell people it’s more than just good quality. It’s experience,” she said. “I think that, especially as a mother of four kids, when we can pop something in the oven and the house smells good, you feel guilt-free that you didn’t do any work but you got dinner in the oven. There’s really something about that, especially for mothers, it feels like you cooked a good meal for your kids and the house smells good.”