Meet Lew Kizer
Most people meet SmashMeals through a meal — a chicken-and-rice tray on Tuesday, a catering spread at the office, a freezer stash that saves the week. Fewer people know the guy behind it. So this is the long version: how a small home kitchen in Mosheim grew into a 100% gluten-free meal-prep company in Kingsport, what being a Methodist pastor has to do with it, and why "made by a family business" isn't marketing fluff here — it's literally how the kitchen runs.
Pull up a chair.
The late-night text that started a company
Eight years ago, Lew was at the hospital sitting with a family during the last hours of a man's life. It was a five-hour vigil, the kind of evening that doesn't really end. In the middle of it, his phone buzzed with a text from his then-wife back home:
"So I think I just started a business."
A few hours later he walked through the front door and asked the obvious follow-up. She was a personal trainer. Some of her clients had been asking her to grocery shop for them. Her counter-offer was simpler: what if I just cook the food for you?
That's when the questions started.
"What are you going to cook? Where are you going to cook it? Where are you going to put it when it's done? How are you going to deliver it? What are you going to put it in?"
They had one tiny stove with coil burners. A small fridge. No commercial space. No license. No system. Just a menu idea and a willingness to figure out one detail at a time.
"Sometimes when you start a business by yourself your mind just runs and runs and runs. But when you have somebody to bounce ideas off of…"
That's how SmashMeals was born — not in a board meeting, not in a business plan, but in a kitchen at the end of a hard night, working out logistics one question at a time.
The day the health inspector showed up
The business grew faster than anyone planned. Lew did the responsible thing — called the State of Tennessee, asked what licenses were required, paid for everything they told him to file. Sales-tax permits, the works. Eleven months in, thousands of dollars of sales tax later, the phone rang.
It was the county health department. Turns out the state hadn't mentioned them. A competitor had complained, and now SmashMeals had a problem.
When the inspector finally came to the house, Lew had done his homework. Stainless steel everything. Proper sinks. Real food-safety setup. The inspector walked through, nodded a lot, and then listed what was missing:
- A No Smoking sign outside the house.
- Hinges on the bathroom doors.
- A three-bay sink instead of a two-bay.
- A separate hand-washing sink.
Thirty days. Keep operating in the meantime.
A buddy's brother worked at Chick-fil-A. They were doing a demo and were about to throw out a three-bay sink and a hand-washing sink. Lew drove down to Morristown with a trailer, hauled the equipment back, drilled holes through his own floor, installed both sinks, ordered hinges off Amazon, hung the No Smoking sign, and called the inspector back.
Score on the re-inspection: 100. First try.
That same kitchen ran SmashMeals all the way until 2020, when the company moved into a full commercial kitchen at the MeadowView Convention Center in Kingsport — where it operates today.
When you become the only one
In late 2026, Lew's marriage ended. He and his ex-wife stayed business partners for a stretch, but eventually she wanted to step away. She suggested closing SmashMeals entirely.
Lew said no.
"I knew how to run the kitchen. I knew all the recipes because I knew how to do everything. But to become fully reliant on yourself… I remember the first day it was just me. A lot of our employees left when she left because they thought we were shutting down. And we didn't. There were just four of us in the kitchen — normally there's nine or ten."
He was honest about the fear:
"I didn't think I would succeed. I was going to give it a shot. But in my mind, I thought I would fail — not because she wasn't there, but because I couldn't do it all."
January 1, 2026 was day one of the new chapter.
By the next March, sales were up 50% year over year.
"To be up 50% in sales when I wasn't sure if I would survive — that's a big deal."
The pastor and the entrepreneur
Here's the part that surprises a lot of customers: Lew has been a United Methodist pastor since he was 18 years old. He currently serves two churches near Bristol, in addition to running SmashMeals. He'll quietly tell you he works "24 hours a day, seven days a week" at both — which is roughly true.
His first sermon, preached as an 18-year-old to a congregation of 15 people whose average age was 77, lasted exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds. The title was "Never go hiking with new hiking boots."
(He'd just spent six weeks driving across the country with a buddy in a 1995 Chevy truck, picked up a hitchhiker, drove him 350 miles to a state park, and started the trip in a pair of brand-new Vasque boots that gave him blisters on day one. The sermon basically wrote itself.)
The serious version of that story came on the same morning. He'd invited his boss from his summertime job at Sears — Gary Lou Jenkins, a Black man Lew loved — to his very first service. A couple in the pews stopped him as people were walking in:
"Those people aren't welcome here."
Lew was 18. He hadn't been a pastor for an hour. The words that came out of his mouth were:
"If you would like to leave, you're more than welcome. But he's with me."
They left and never came back. He still can't tell you their names. But that moment shaped how he runs everything since — the church, the kitchen, the business.
"It's also a reminder: we look at people who make mistakes in churches, who fail, who get divorces, who go to prison, who do stupid things — and we say, 'they're in church, they should be better than that.' No. They're in church. They're there to get better. They're not there because they're better."
That's the same posture you'll feel from SmashMeals as a brand. We're not here to judge what kind of week you've had. We're here to make it easier.
Why everything we make is gluten-free
People ask all the time: why a 100% gluten-free kitchen? It would be easier — and cheaper — to be a regular meal-prep company that "offers gluten-free options." A lot of competitors do exactly that.
But "gluten-free option" inside a regular kitchen is not the same as celiac-focused food made in a dedicated facility. Cross-contamination is real. A shared cutting board, a shared fryer, a flour-dusty countertop — for someone with celiac disease or a serious gluten intolerance, that's not a small problem. That's a hospital trip.
So the SmashMeals kitchen is 100% gluten-free, full stop. No regular flour ever comes through the door. Same prep surfaces, same ovens, same containers — all gluten-free, every meal, every time. If you're celiac, you can eat anything on the menu without doing detective work.
Owning a kitchen like this also forced Lew to think about food differently:
"I have to think seven days in advance. If I make something, somebody's going to eat it seven days from now. That's really hard when you're making breads or anything like that — it's good in the first two days, three days, but further out it's not great. Cottage cheese has been a huge game changer for a lot of the things we make. It's still really good seven days later."
That's the unglamorous side of meal prep. We're not plating food for a beautiful table the moment it's done. We're cooking food that has to be just as good when you warm it up on a Wednesday night after work. Gluten-free, hitting macros, and still craveable on day six. That's the bar.
Why the family thing actually matters
LB and Daisy — Lew's twins — turn 16 the week this is being written. They've worked at SmashMeals literally since the day it started.
"It's amazing. Yesterday I took LB to his first flying lesson and the instructor said, 'do you have any chefs?' I was like, he's one of my main ones. He's better than me at cooking meat. And Daisy is so good at making all the desserts and running the kitchen and telling people what to do. When we're all three there together it works so well — they're almost an extension of my hands, but better."
That's not a marketing line. If you've picked up an order at the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, there's a very good chance one of them handed it to you.
It's also why "local family business" means something specific around here. SmashMeals isn't a franchise. It isn't venture-backed. It isn't a brand someone bought off a shelf. It's a kitchen run by a pastor and his teenage twins, in a commercial space behind the MeadowView Convention Center, cooking gluten-free meals for the Tri-Cities — and shipping them on $30 flat-rate FedEx Ground to customers across the Southeast.
What's next
Eight years in, the playbook is simple and a little stubborn:
- Keep the kitchen 100% gluten-free. No exceptions, no "we can do regular too."
- Keep it local. SmashMeals is built around the Tri-Cities, with grab-and-go hubs at gyms and fitness studios across Kingsport, Johnson City, and Tusculum, plus $30 flat-rate FedEx Ground shipping (Tuesday delivery) for everyone else.
- Keep it family-run. subscription-optional traps, no membership fees. Order five meals or twenty-five. Order this week and skip next week. Cancel anytime — there's nothing to cancel.
If you've never tried us, the easiest place to start is the weekly menu. If you're new to gluten-free meal prep entirely, the Gluten-Free Meal Prep Guide walks you through how it works, why we do it the way we do, and what to expect.
And if you ever want to meet the man behind it — the pastor, the dad, the guy who installed his own three-bay sink at 2 a.m. so a health inspector wouldn't shut him down — you'll usually find him at the kitchen on Sunday afternoon. Say hi.
"They've been working for SmashMeals since the day we started it. As an entrepreneur you have to learn as you go. Then you teach the people that are important to you the things you learned after you went through all the mistakes — so they can do it better than you. As a dad, that's something I really love to see."
That's the SmashMeals story. We're glad you're part of it.