Meal Assembly Watch

I guess Dream Dinners is running low on recipes so they’ve launched another recipe contest. This is such a great idea. Dream Dinners spends a mere $500, far cheaper than actually hiring a chef or development team of their own, and they get dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people to submit recipes they can rip-off and call their own. As they state, their best recipes come from their customers.

I still find it ironic as hell that people who are too busy to cook for themselves seem to have all these recipes lying around that they’re willing to hand over to a company for some free food.

For the stores that are still open, I’d be curious to know how many customers come through the door each month and what is the average price of the bill? Are they just stopping in for a meal or two from the "grab and go" option or are they sticking around and making a full month’s worth of meals?

It used to be that a store would average around 300 people a month with most of them going for the full meal plan (10-12). What kind of figures are you seeing these days?

The industry was founded on the idea that people come in and make the meals themselves, that way they know what’s in it, customize it to their personal tastes and have a sense of ownership about the meals.

Great idea, but is it really working out these days? So many people just want to come in and pick-up the meals. Super Supper jumped on that bandwagon and turned everything over to meal pick-up. At one point Dream Dinners completely frowned on this idea, but there were plenty of owners who were tossing out the rules and doing whatever it took to make some money. And you can clearly see that many independent stores were offering both options all day long. No more sessions, just come in and make meals whenever you want or drop by and grab something.

So where do things stand now? Have owners ditched the whole meal assembly process and simply have customers grab pre-made meals or are you still encouraging customers to come in and make the meals for themselves?

Here ’s another question you can ask yourself, where are the meal assembly millionaires? A good franchise should be able to propel you into the millionaire category within 5-7 years, don’t you think? Since meal prep has been around since 2003, and the franchise sold the dickens out of this concept, where are the slew of millionaires we should be hearing about by now? After 7 years there should be dozens of owners across the country that are ready to retire and live the life of luxury from the profits of their stores. You have to be out there and I’d love to hear how you did it.

On a more serious note, I doubt most owners are making a profit from their stores let alone something that even comes close to a teacher’s salary. I still firmly believe that if you’re not personally making at least $40k a year as a salary for yourself then you need to start devising an escape plan.

So, who’s gotten rich of meal assembly? Where are ya?

Recently I’ve seen some new articles crop up speaking the virtues of meal assembly and how it can make meal time easier and help people lose ridiculous amounts of weight. Putting that misinformation aside I hope people aren’t getting the idea that now is the right time to invest in a meal prep business. Just because you can pick up a store at a bargain basement price doesn’t mean you should jump on board and get one.

It’s been awhile since the point has been made so now is a good time to go back and show what buying a meal prep franchise WON’T GET YOU

- You don’t get a national marketing campaign
- You don’t get a franchise run by people with decades or even years worth of restaurant experience
- You don’t get discounted prices because your franchise buys in bulk
- You won’t see your company name listed in dozens of magazines and flyers unless YOU pay for it
- You won’t get handcrafted recipes put together by culinary experts. What you will get is a slew of recipes lifted from other published sources and submitted recipes from contests.
- You won’t get assistance from other store owners in your area since you’re in competition with each other
- You’re going to spend all your time in your store struggling to make a living instead of spending time with your family
- You don’t get guaranteed system for making money
- You won’t be working less hours than a 9-5 job in Corporate America
- You don’t get a repeatable system for bringing in customers
- You won’t be making more than the teacher who watches over your children and gets three months off every summer

Just keep those few things in mind if you have some wild notion that now might be the time to swoop in and make a run with a meal prep store.