Our story

Could there be more to life?

Vegetables, there isn’t much Lieven doesn’t know about them. His great-grandfather started selling vegetables on his bicycle as long ago as 1925. The four sons Van Lommel followed in his footsteps and built up a wholesale vegetable business

Grandson Johan - Lieven’s father - continued the tradition, and his mother, Mattie, ran her veg shop. She was the “queen of greens”. For the best vegetables, you simply had to go and see Mattie.
When she decided to make vegetable combinations packed in individual bowls she was the first one in Europe to do so. As long as everything was tasty and easy. She can speak from experience. After all, with three children and just as many French fries shops within walking distance, it was not an easy thing to get her children to eat vegetables without too much grumbling. And they do eat them.

So her son Lieven got a taste for them at a very young age. He also knew what he wanted, and that was to combine vegetables, and bring together unexpected flavours. In a nutshell, to make vegetables sexy again.

Everything could be done better

Lieven immediately saw things big. He swapped the kitchen table for an industrial work surface. From Herselt, he now supplies the best StarMeal salads to shops and supermarkets all over Belgium, the Netherlands, starting in France, Germany and Denmark.

And good is never good enough for Lieven. Besides the recipes concocted by his in-house vegetable chefs, he also uses recipes created by his close friend Jeroen Meus. He is not only the most popular chef from Leuven and the surrounding areas, but he is also the man on television who brings some rock ‘n’ roll to his cooking. And when motocross legend Stefan Everts also came to consult him, Lieven and his team put together a salad high in carbohydrates to guarantee a steady supply of horsepower.

From field to table

Speed of lightning; Lieven knows all there is to know about this. In record time, the StarMeal vegetables leave the markets to reach the chilled counters in your local stores. And this whilst everything is lovingly prepared by hand and packaged in the large modern vegetable workshop.
This approach definitely guarantees that your salad is always fresh, and crisp and crunchy, and that even the most subtle of flavours are perfectly preserved.