Dina Light-McNeely handed out 1,500 samples of her butternut squash and roasted corn soups at Cliff Fest this past weekend.

Her homegrown venture, Oak Cliff Soup Co., launches the first week of December offering soup delivery service in our neighborhood.

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She’s modeling her delivery method after the Soup Peddler in Austin. The soup company’s menu will be published Monday; orders are due by Wednesday; and delivery or pickup is Friday or Saturday, respectively. The soups will cost $15 each and come in a 32-ounce mason jar, plus a $1 deposit on the jar. “It’s kind of like the milk man,” Light-McNeely says. “If you send it back to us, we don’t charge you the dollar again.”

Light-McNeely says she “cooked her way through undergrad and grad school” and trained under a traditional French chef in Lubbock. Friends have been urging to sell her delicious homemade soups for years, she says. And three months ago, she was laid off from her job in marketing, after an 18-year career.

All that means soup for you, Oak Cliff.

“I haven’t cooked professionally for a long time,” McNeely says, but she is a foodie, a home cook and a gardener. Many of her soups are vegan or vegetarian and free of lactose and gluten.

She is renting space from a commercial kitchen in Oak Cliff and will be up and running soon.