Meal Assembly Watch

There could be some good information here used to persuade customers on the benefits of meal assembly and the cost savings.

If you could buy blocks of time at the grocery store, how much would you pay for them? What would you pay to avoid much of the supermarket, the fast food drive-up, weekly restaurant tabs? Choosing recipes, scrubbing, peeling, chopping, trimming? Washing pots and pans?

Clients of meal assembly businesses — Pass Your Plate, Do It Dinners and Super Suppers in Albuquerque — often start out expecting to pay extra for the convenience of all that avoidance. It’s worth my time, they’ll say. I’m busy; I’m stressed; I hate to cook.

What a surprise, then, for those who buy package deals and discover the convenience doesn’t necessarily cost more — or much more — than the do-it-yourself approach. What a bigger surprise for those who stop dining out so much, crunch numbers and discover they’re saving money.

For the sake of convenience, the Chinisci family of five used to go out twice a week. Now they’re down to every 10 days or so, preferring home-cooked meals.

“When I first started, my husband was a little taken aback,” says Gigi Chinisci, admission coordinator at Albuquerque Academy and a client at Pass Your Plate for a year. “But when I kept going, he realized our food bill went down $50 a month. He said, ‘Why are you only buying three meals; why not six?’ ”

Read the full article here:

Other Articles of Interest:

• It’s all in the planning
• Is meal assembly cheaper than making meals at home?
• Variation on a theme
• Super Suppers Reduces the Cost of Family Dinnertime
• Meal Assembly not really all that swell
• Tips for saving money on that expensive food budget
• Much Ado About Nothing
• More Moms Staying (and Eating) at Home
• What do we mean by brand recognition?
• Price, convenience pumping up sales of grocers’ prepared meals