Ed Boyes and Patrick Drake are men on a mission . . . to change the way Oxonians cook and eat.

“We want to reverse the trend away from ready meals and unhealthy convenience food, by making it easy and fun to cook delicious, nutritious meals at home from scratch,” said Oxford-educated Ed, 24.

Last year they launched HelloFresh.co.uk – a grocery delivery service, which features step-by-step recipes and the exact fresh ingredients required to cook them.

“My time at Oxford was fundamental to taking the leap of faith which led to the birth of Hello Fresh,” said Ed.

“The university instils in its students the belief that they can and will succeed at anything they put their mind to, and the entrepreneurial spirit here is infectious.”

Ed is commercial manager and Patrick – a former Goldman Sachs lawyer who pursued his lifelong love for food by training at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant – is head chef.

“We delivered our first boxes from Patrick’s living room in early 2012 and sent out 10 boxes mostly to family and friends with hand-written recipes,” said Ed.

From there business has grown quickly. “We had no idea of the power behind the concept,” said Ed.

“Just over a year later we’ve delivered over 100,000 meals, with customer growth of 30 to 50 per cent month-on-month served by a team of 25 employees.”

Entrepreneurship is nothing new to Ed. He set up Tops Off, a company that manufactured and sold credit card-sized bottle openers, aged 15, followed by Socks On, a service which offered subscribers regular deliveries of fine Italian socks.

Both of the businesses funded his education at Queens College. At first HelloFresh was just for the London area but now it’s gone nationwide and sales are growing all over, including Oxford, said Ed.

“Oxford boasts some of the UK’s best fine dining restaurants and is where many aspiring chefs head to cut their teeth, so it’s only natural that its residents have a superior appreciation of food.”

Feedback has been positive. “Three people have said that we saved their marriage, which is not what we were expecting to hear,” he said.

Ed said generally customers were aged between 30 and 50, had a busy lifestyle and 80 per cent were women.

As well as making it easier to cook from scratch, by having ingredients delivered, ready measured out and with an illustrated recipe card to follow, Ed said it also eliminated waste and helped people get out of the rut of cooking the same few things over and over.

Patrick and guest chefs come up with eight new recipes a week and around 300 different meal packages have been delivered so far. “

We make it easy and affordable to discover new ways of cooking fresh food without waste,” said Ed.

It depends on the package but meals tend to work out at about £5 a portion. Ed said because of its bulk buying power HelloFresh customer got better quality produce than they could get in the supermarket for the same price. “We’re very excited by the reaction so far,” said Ed. “But we see this as just the start of the journey.”