Dec 27, 2017 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

With the time to honor New Year’s resolutions fast approaching, commercials already are bombarding us with images of well-toned folks working out on trendy gym equipment or hawking gimmick diets.

For those who seek longer-term solutions rather than quick fixes, Gretchen McNary sees a spike in her business as the carbs and sugars of each holiday season careen into the realities of too-snug clothing and too-steep scale readings.

The Peters Township resident’s business is Girl Friday Cooking Co., and she specializes in giving the people what they want, as long as it’s healthy food.

Since moving her once-a-week prepared meal operation from her own kitchen to a spacious former tavern in the heart of Finleyville, Girl Friday – think back to literature class and “Robinson Crusoe” for the reference – has proceeded a positive direction and is poised even more of an upturn in 2018.

“And I’m totally freaked out about it,” McNary will admit. “I’m all about slow growth. I like a nice, steady flow, and then I stay in control of where we go. And maybe sometimes I hinder it a little bit,” she also will acknowledge, “because it’s stressful.”

Plus there’s this:

“I don’t have a food background. I’m just a mom who had an idea.”

After her mother, Mary Joanne Williams, died of cancer in 2013, McNary found herself compensating by paying an exceptional amount of attention to everything that was going on in the lives of her children, Soren, Sloane and Freya. Husband Ron, too.

“They were just kind of like, you need a hobby,” she recalled. “I had started cooking Paleo food a year before, and I started working out. It really changed things for me, and I felt better. So I was constantly posting on Facebook about all the things I was making.”

For the uninitiated, Nerd Fitness’ “Beginners’ Guide to the Paleo diet summarizes it thusly: If a caveman didn’t eat it, neither should you.

“And then my gym, Crossfit South Hills, I just started cooking some things for people there,” McNary continued. “Another gym found out what I was doing, and they said, ‘We want in on this.’ And then another crossfit gym. And then it just got really big.”

Eventually, she decided to turn the demand into a home business, offering a selection of foods that customers can order online and pick up each Wednesday.

Soon afterward, she hired Kelly Duerr, whom she refers to as her “right hand.” On the left is Carolina Robison, and the three have developed quite the effective manner of working together:

“We don’t even have to talk to each other.”

With Duerr moving on to other opportunities, though, McNary is contemplating “having maybe a new chef come in, someone to assist me and help with a lot of the processes and move things forward.”

That includes more uses for the Finleyville headquarters.

“This space is so awesome, and I’ve kept it so private,” McNary said. “It needs to be shared. I want this to be a community. I want people to be able to come here and have coffee, nothing complicated, just a nice cup of coffee. And people can meet in the back room.”

One development she looks for is to help promote a better understanding of what Girl Friday offers. While Paleo-diet selections still are part of the menu, which varies weekly, McNary offers a variety of foods with a couple of aspects in common: They all are homemade, and they’re made from the best of ingredients, sourced locally whenever possible.

“This is everything to me,” she said about her business. “And so I just want to make sure everything I do is right, because it’s important, and I want it to succeed so much.”

For more information, visit girlfridaycookingco.com.