Welcome to Bestest Mommy Boss, a new section on the blog that will feature entrepreneurial moms who have turned their passions into lucrative side hustles and full-time businesses. 

Cherri Dashields is a Philly-based personal chef who can make a mean vegan version of any meat dish.

Cherri Dashields, 45
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Business: Brown Veggie Mom,
plant-based personal chef
Profit: Between $500 and $1,500 a month
Reach her on Instagram @brownveggiemom

When Cherri Dashields tells people she’s vegan, the first question she gets asked is: “Oh wow, what do you eat?”

“Anything you can make with meat, I can make vegan,” she says, proudly. “Someone asked me about oxtails and I said, ‘come on over and I will make you some vegan oxtails.’”

Vegan oxtails huh? Cherri could sense I might be a skeptic. “If you lived closer, you could come over my house and I would feed you,” she promises.

And apparently, that’s how it starts.

Cherri, 45, runs Brown Veggie Mom, a personal vegan chef service that grew out of her love of food and a habit of feeding anyone that visits her home.

Her recipes mimic meaty meals using plant-based healthy alternatives, greens, and vegetables—all seasoned just right.

Cherri’s crabless cakes sold out in just a few days.

Visit her Instagram feed @brownveggiemom and you’ll lick the screen—and feel good about it. Oven-ready lasagna, crabless cakes, and stuffed shells are her most popular dishes. She gets repeated requests for black pepper tofu and jerk tofu with rice and beans.

A grocery store manager by day, Cherri credits her culinary passion and cooking instincts to her grandmother, who made everything from scratch and always cooked at home.

“Everybody eats and it’s kind of the thing that draws people together,” Cherri said. “If you come to my home, we will eat and if we go out, we will talk about food.”

Following her passion pays well too. During the Super Bowl she sold out of Buffalo cauliflower, Buffalo tofu and 5-Bean Chili—she took 30 orders for $20 a meal that can feed 2 – 3 people. Her normal entrees are $10 and she stops at 30 orders, “because I still want it to be fun,” she said.

Cherri’s vegan menus are sent out on Wednesday, orders are placed by Friday, and she cooks on Sunday, delivering trays of plant-based meals on Monday.

A background in the grocery industry doesn’t hurt when it comes to shopping for the right ingredients. “With food, you have to do a 60 percent markup,” Cherri says without hesitation. “You have to know how to charge for food based on how much it costs and add in the cost of your seasonings and other elements, everything down to the containers to put it in.”

Cherri estimates she makes between $500 and $1,500 a month profit, depending on how much time she works and the number of customers.

Fueled by referrals and word of mouth, most of her customers are repeats—the widower who needs a home-cooked meal, friends looking for healthy sides to their fried chicken, and folks who want to try a vegan meal without the commitment.

None of her customers are vegan—yet. The real goal, Cherri says, is to get people to eat healthier food.

“I hear people say that healthy food doesn’t taste good and I say, ‘It does, you just have to make it right, season it, and make it taste good to eat it.’”