WECO Hospitality is a company in Connecticut re-imagining food service, brining fresh dishes crafted by chefs during the day to the doorstep in time for dinner.
Customers pay whatever they think is fair for the service.
Now, WECO is breaking the mold in a new way, giving three deserving families a free dinner every week of 2023. To two recipients, it means much more than good food.
During a chance encounter on an airplane, Dale McCarthy met Sam and Brynne Bish.
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“I just met them and heard their story,” McCarthy said.
“Sam and I are newlyweds,” Brynne said. The couple got married in May of 2022.
During casual conversation, McCarthy learned why the expectant parents are moving to New England.
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“You know, as a mom, it just really hit me,” she said.
The encounter prompted McCarthy, who is a WECO Hospitality customer, to nominate the couple for WECO’s sweepstakes.
“Our mission is to share joy through food,” Jennifer Fremont-Smith, WECO Hospitality founder and CEO, said.
WECO Hospitality launched in Boston during the pandemic in 2020, and has since expanded throughout Connecticut and New England. Now through the sweepstakes, WECO chefs are whipping up one free dinner every week of 2023 for three families.
“We decided to ask our customers to submit stories of people that they thought could use that extra support,” Fremont-Smith said.
Brynne and Sam were selected. The soon-to-be parents are facing a lot, something they discovered during an anatomy scan in October.
“She got to the heart, and she did about four to five minutes of scanning,” Brynne said. “That's when Sam and I kind of had an idea that there was something wrong.”
During that appointment, they learned they are having a little boy.
“We want to name him Killian, which is Gaelic for ‘little warrior,’” Brynne said.
It’s a relevant symbol because of the diagnosis they got next.
“About 30 seconds after we chose the name, the doctor came in and said, ‘You know, I want to let you know that we are pretty sure that your baby has something called hypoplastic left heart syndrome,” Brynne said. “I immediately just crumbled into tears. What we were seeing was, this was 100% fatal for infants, there was no cure.”
Sam is a network engineer and Brynne is in law school, but they turned their lives upside down. They left their home in Cleveland, Ohio four days after the diagnosis for an appointment at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“We both knew that this was the place that we needed to give our son the best shot to life,” Brynne said.
With their baby due in about six weeks, they know they will be facing grueling months.
“Basically the treatment is through a series of three open heart surgeries,” Brynne said. “We will just be there 12, 14 hours a day, just tracking his care and seeing if we can get him to be as strong as he possibly can.”
Fremont-Smith and McCarthy are glad to lend whatever support they can during this time.
“I just couldn't be happier that that this came together in the way that it did,” Fremont-Smith said.
“This was one sort of little thing that I could take off of their plate, or put on their plate,” McCarthy said.
In the midst of so much, the couple finds some normalcy in those moments seated together at the dinner table.
“You really can't describe just the amount of support that we've felt so far,” Sam said.
“While we're trying to finish up school, and then also work, and just manage a lot of hospital visits and stays, we'll have access to the healthy nutritious food that we need,” Brynne said. “So this is, it's beyond a blessing. It's really hard to put into words, how this was such a lifeline.”
