The emerging make-and-take meal business morphs into a dinner boutique

The convergence of aspirations for good, healthy meals with a documented need for family table time and a quest to know exactly what’s in the food and where it came from could turn consumers on to the kitchen stove again.

But maybe not like as in the past.

To the rescue is the young-and-growing quick-meal-prep industry. Consumers—usually busy moms—go into one of the nearly 1,200 meal-prep outlets nationwide once a month, assemble chopped and prepared ingredients for several featured recipes, snap on the lids or zip the bags, and rush home to the freezer with multiple servings of a month’s worth of meals. Thaw, cook, and serve. Done.

The concept started its “make-and-take” ascent in 2002. Caterer Stephanie Allen and a friend had already been meeting together regularly and assembling ingredients for multiple meals and told their friends about it. After 9/11, people wanted to get back to the dinner table, they wanted home-cooked meals, and they wanted to save money, Allen says. “People came out of the woodwork asking for my help.”

In March 2002, she gathered 44 women in a rented commercial kitchen, and by June she opened her first store Dream Dinners. The concept now has 209 franchised units in 37 states with headquarters in Snohomish, Washington.

Quickly, similar concepts popped up across the county, and today the meal-prep industry is a $370-million business, expected to increase to $410 million by the end of 2009, according to The Easy Meal Prep Co., a Cheyenne, Wyoming–based consulting company.

Though meal-assembly concepts account for less than two-tenths of a percent of dinners, innovation abounds and could be contagious to consumers when more of them catch wind of it.

Lack of consumer awareness is the meal-prep industry’s biggest challenge, says Bert Vermeulen, owner/president of The Easy Meal Prep Co. “It allows traditional dinner at home, which is healthy for the body and mentally healthy for the family. A lot of people know they need that, but they don’t look for this concept as a solution. A large portion of the population doesn’t know it exists or how it works,” he says.
Old habits are the biggest competition to the meal-prep industry, says Judie Byrd, founder of Super Suppers, a Fort Worth, Texas-based chain of 150 franchised stores in 41 states. “Busy working moms don’t want to gather up the kids after working long hours, put them in the car, and sit at a restaurant and eat, but they do. It’s an old habit,” she says.

Consumer Votes

Consumers who are aware of the quick meal-prep concept have pushed the industry in new directions, both operationally and in terms of flavors, ingredients, and meals.
The same crave for convenience that led to the drive-thru has caused much of the meal-prep industry to transition from consumers assembling the ingredients to the store custom-assembling them for the consumer. The customer usually goes online, orders the meals with instructions on ingredients to leave out or include more of, then swings by to pick up the containers ready for the freezer. In 2004, 90 percent of the meals were assembled by the customer. The Easy Meal Prep Co. estimates that by the end of this year, only 33 percent of the customers will assemble the meals themselves.

At Super Suppers, Byrd estimates that only 5 percent of her customers still come in and assemble their own meals, and she likes it that way—calling it “take and bake.” Staff assembly of the ingredients guarantees quality control. “The cooking instructions are tested on that recipe. If someone constructs their own, there are variables, like how much a cup is. Some say it’s a level cup; some say it’s a heaping cup,” she says.

Yet Allen with Dream Dinners still banks on the business model of customers coming in for the “girls’ night out” meal-assembly social time. “We don’t compete with the office take-out or the curbside to-go,” she says.

Yet others freely experiment with different business models.

When Jeff Stevens and his wife started their single-unit San Francisco Bay area Deeelish! Meals Made Easy business a few years ago, Stevens went at it with a desire to match the area’s lofty culinary standards with consumers’ high expectations. “It meant hiring a chef with a phenomenal background and skills and an understanding of the limitations this process imposes from a cooking standpoint,” he says, referring to menu items that are freezable, easy to assemble, and simple to prepare at home. He hired veteran Bay area restaurant chef Lev Dagan, who also is an instructor at the California Culinary Academy.

Beyond the chef’s ability to create great recipes, it was important to Stevens to offer multiple meal-purchase options and delivery methods.

While most of the meal-prep companies have pricing options to prepare a set number of meals, Deeelish started a Supper Club program last summer. Customers could buy 10 or 15 meal credits up front, allowing them to come in and prepare one or two meals at a time within a certain period of time. “It’s another way to give more flexibility,” Stevens says.

More than 90 percent of the Deeelish meals are prepared by store staff, and the company ships many of the orders by Federal Express throughout the Bay area and into Oregon, Southern California, and even Texas and Hawaii.

The company also added a corporate delivery program. “We go out and strike up relationships with a company, put a refrigerator onsite, and we deliver food to the company and put it in the refrigerators,” he says. Employees simply order the meals online, pick them up from the company refrigerator, and take them home to the freezer.

In a further effort to get the meals to consumers conveniently, the company has programs with some elementary and secondary schools to deliver the preordered meals to parents in a 30-minute window in the afternoon as they swing by the school to pick up their kids.

Standout Food

Each meal-assembly company aims to stand out with consumers by presenting recipes that represent their tastes and values.

Boulder, Colorado–based The Organic Dish began in early 2007 as a place to come prepare recipes using organic ingredients. Now the staff prepares nearly all orders, and customers come in and pick up their meals, says co-owner Beckie Hemmerling.
In addition to organic and natural ingredients (antibiotic- and hormone-free, grass-fed, free-range, and local), Hemmerling’s operation also caters to vegetarians, vegans, and those with food allergies and other dietary needs. She substitutes quinoa for couscous, offers wheat-free soy sauce, and modifies recipes to meet low-fat, low sodium requests. “Most people just want to know the food is not processed. They look at the ingredient list, and they know everything that’s on it,” Hemmerling says.

Since the price is determined by the number of servings assembled and not per item or dish, food costs are the starting point in determining the monthly recipe selections, says Natalie Lasch, corporate executive chef for Atlanta-based The Dinner A’Fare, with 42 locations in upscale lifestyle centers. She looks for diversity in food costs after examining commodity prices.

Her second consideration is the diversity of customers. “Every customer isn’t a mother with 2.2 kids,” she says. Some are singles looking for trendy foods, and there are a growing number of customers looking at phytochemicals, organics, and gluten-free.

Lasch considers it imperative that she keep up with culinary trends. “What are chefs bringing in? I can’t do something as escalated as that, but I try to make a home version of it,” she says. Among her contacts are members of the U.S. Culinary Olympic Team who report back on what they see around the world.
“A big thing over the past year has been gourmet pizza. I’ve done a few of those, including a Thai flatbread pizza,” Lasch says. Noodle bowls also have become trendy, so she’s incorporated some of those into her recipe bank.

Though customers’ tastes vary widely geographically, Lasch notices that there’s greater acceptance of unusual spices, like Chinese Five Spice. “People are starting to be more aware of these culinary trends,” she says. She also has had great success with gastro pub food—taking bar food up to the next level, citing rustic chicken and potato gratin as an example. That particular recipe mixes chicken flavored with chili powder and paprika to give it smokiness with red skin potato wedges, cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese, and green onions. “Bake it all off together and it browns on top. Serve it with a unique sour cream sauce, and it’s a feel-good meal,” Lasch says.

Customers who buy into the meal-assembly concept look to try new options, says Michele Bellso, president and CEO of Syracuse, New York–based Make & Take Gourmet. Some of the more daring and successful Make & Take’s recipes of late include Thai pineapple curry chicken; Thai burgers with creamy cucumber relish; and Bow-Thai pasta.

Creativity also abounds with all-American dinner favorites. Bellso serves a pork tenderloin, for example, flavored with dried fruit. “People are used to the tenderloin, but we use dried apricots and wine sauce. It steams together as it cooks, and the flavor is incredible,” she says. Brown sugar meatloaf (with a brown sugar glaze over the top) is another customer favorite.

To make sure outlets are “hitting the spot” with the recipes they offer, Deeelish sends out a survey at the end of each month to get food feedback, while Dream Dinners uses tasting panels that include kids to determine what dishes make the menu. Of the 17 monthly dishes Deeelish features, about one-third are new recipes. The rest are classics that have sold well in the past; the best of the best; and a few “fast lane” items designed for grab and go
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All the dishes developed for Super Suppers are tested by chefs at the Culinary School of Fort Worth, which was also founded by Judie Byrd.

While other quick meal-prep franchises might require franchisees to offer the same revolving monthly recipes, experience has taught Byrd to allow more flexibility. “We have about 400 entrées in the library. Every month, franchisees choose which they want,” she says. Byrd, however, recommends Super Supper operators include four national best-sellers as well as four to six new recipes. “After that, they can fill in with what sells best in their areas.”