Assemble Your Own Meals

Back in June, Springwise wrote about Dream Dinners and other meal assembly stores. The concept is very similar to something we considered briefly for Fresh Start. While the article (partly excerpted below) focuses on the convenience of meal assembly stores, and Dream Dinners itself focuses on feeding a family, we were interested in the community aspect that cooking together could promote. And from watching the service walkthrough video on the Dream Dinners website, it does seem like the service accomplishes this goal as well.

Though they vary in style, all of the dinner assembly companies offer essentially the same service: customers schedule a session online, picking meals from a monthly menu. The store, a large commercial-grade kitchen, organizes freshly chopped and prepared ingredients in practical stations. Customers move around the store, assembling a meal at each station by scooping ingredients into freezer bags or disposable baking pans. Meals are easily customized to accommodate personal tastes or diets – the customer just adds more or less fresh garlic or ginger, or substitutes pork for beef. Finally, the packaged meals are clearly labeled with cooking instructions.

The whole process takes about 2 hours, preparing 12 six-serving, or 24 three-serving meals at a cost of around USD 3 per serving. And no time spent shopping for food, planning meals, prepping beforehand and cleaning up afterwards.

Business is booming for a reason: the meal assembly concept offers time-starved consumers (especially working moms) an innovative and convenient way to provide their families with nutritious, tasty, home-cooked meals, with more variety, healthier options and at a lower cost than take-out or frozen supermarket meals.

The complete article is available on Springwise: Family dinners, 24 at a time

There are a couple of aspects to this type of service which differ from the Fresh Start project.

First, Fresh Start was targeted at individuals who were looking to make a change in their lives. Parents preparing dinner for their family is a different demographic. Second, Fresh Start was interested in educating customers about cooking processes and helping them eventually become independent. Dream Dinners focuses on time-saving, convenience, and healthy food, but it’s not clear how much education about cooking processes it imparts, nor does it seem to promote independence: customers will continue to be customers because of the convenience offered by the service. Not that this is bad: it’s just a different goal.