‘Healthy Horse Show Food’ – no longer an oxymoron thanks to Angela Baugh
Feature written for HorseGrooms.com by Paper Horse’s Sarah Eakin
Grooming and eating healthily are rarely coupled together in a sentence. The impracticalities of the hours, locations and options – namely horse show food – make it difficult to maintain a nutritious regime. For Angela, poor diet was not just inconvenient, it was unsustainable. A Cancer survivor and living with Crohn’s disease, Baugh had to find a better way to fuel her body.
Angela draws inspiration from a relative
Angela was inspired by her cousin who was initially based in Los Angeles and later cooked for professional athletes in Dallas. Covid saw her take up meal prepping and what started out as cooking for herself and her boyfriend at the gym, flourished into a sustainable business. Others noticed the attractive – and healthy – contents of the lunch containers they were bringing to work out. Demand soon turned into supply.
Having witnessed her cousin’s success Angela began to question why horse shows did not offer quality meals. “In Europe, there are healthy options,” she said. “Here you are too busy and you are faced with whatever processed food is closest or you are left with buying an expensive mediocre salad.”
Last year in the midst of the Winter Equestrian Festival, Angela made a radical move – she installed a fridge at the showgrounds. “I had no business plan. No real system yet,” she said. “I just knew people were exhausted and they wanted real food so I thought ‘let’s see what happens’.”