A brilliant business model.

[rivka]

I'm thinking I might do this:

Simply sign up for a session and choose the items you wish to make from our monthly menu. We have fully equipped stations, with fresh ingredients sliced, diced, and ready to go. You simply follow the posted directions, tweak the food to your family’s specific tastes (Don’t like onions? Ditch the onions! Love garlic? Add more!), assemble the meal in the pans and freezer bags we provide, and presto!

Each meal serves 6 people, or can be split into smaller packages for smaller families. We've created family-friendly recipes specially designed to be frozen and heated when you need them. After two hours with us, you can stock your freezer with a number of "ready-to-cook" dishes you made and that your family will love throughout the month.

Sixteen meals-for-three would be $155 - which works out to much less money than takeout food, for better nutrition. And while it would certainly be much cheaper to make and freeze food myself, realistically speaking, I have just enough energy to shop and cook for one set of meals every week, in addition to working full time, gestating (which takes an unbelievable amount of energy), and getting things ready for the baby. I don't think I would have the energy to do two sets of meals from scratch. So it's very appealing to think of someone else doing all the shopping, prepwork, and cleanup.

Looking at their menus, I see plenty of things we would enjoy eating. It looks like it's main course-oriented, and so we'd want to supplement a lot of the entrees with vegetables or bread or rice. But that's easy enough to do at the last minute, and wouldn't take a lot of cooking.

Someone had a fantastic idea, here. What a great business model.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I don't think they'll get the volume of clientele that they need. It seems like a novelty more than a sustainable business.

That being said, I would like something like this to succeed. It's a really good idea.

B

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Wow, I completely disagree. I think their target market is working mothers who are relatively financially comfortable and feel guilty about not cooking enough meals from scratch for their families, and I think the number of those women is legion.

They're also presenting themselves as a social opportunity for busy working moms. When I booked my session, I discovered that lots of people are booking in groups - the Mom's Club of this, the mothers of That Church, etc. It's a way to carve out adults-only social time that you don't have to feel guilty about. (Um, not that *I* would feel guilty about wanting adult social time, but I think it's a common emotional reaction for their target market.)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Maybe so. Plus, so many people don't know how to cook anymore, so maybe the people who go will do so because they want to learn some stuff about how to make dinner.

I'm from another planet, though. I certainly qualified as a busy working mom (full time job, single mom of two in school, full time student taking 3 to 5 classes per semester) but even if I'd been able to afford this (which I couldn't), I'd never had signed up for it. I already knew how to make quick scratch meals. Which lead to such interesting moments as the kids fighting over whose turn it was to season the scratch spaghetti sauce.

If I'm right, then this business will evolve to include some larger teaching component, because that is part of what the people who use the service are looking for.

My mother had a subscription to Family Circle magazine in the 1970s. I find it exceedingly odd that the women who were its primary audience are still around and that they are younger than I am.

There's a cultural boat here that I completely missed.

K.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I am always amazed to come across adults who don't know how to cook (which includes my husband, although (a) the amazement has worn off over our seven years together, and (b) he is now learning).

But I was also shocked to discover that a significant number of families don't even eat together. (About 25% of families with children eat together less than 4 times per week.) In some of these families one of the adults prepares one meal and leaves it for everyone else, but in others the fridge is just stocked with food and people forage. So kids eat a lot of mac and cheese or sandwiches or Lean Cuisines, and don't grow up with having cooking modeled for them.

Not in my family, damn it. I enjoy cooking from scratch.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

The question is whether people are booking events because of the movelty, or whether it will sustain. I suspect the former, although I'd rather if you were right and I was wrong.

B