The Hybrid Concept Comes to Dinner

by Matt Bell

Hybrid vehicles, which run on both gasoline and another power source like electricity, are growing in popularity, and now so is the hybrid dinner solution. We're talking about the fast growing "Easy Meal Prep" industry. Easy Meal Prep stores, which offer customers something in between a restaurant meal and a home-cooked meal, are essentially prep kitchens where you put together anywhere from four to 12 meals to be taken home, frozen, and then prepared for dinner with minimal further effort.

Their popularity can be seen in the fact that there is now even an Easy Meal Prep Association, with a web site listing such stores by state and city. As of mid-May, the association's site listed 280 companies with over 770 locations in the U.S. and Canada. Another 300 stores are slated to open soon.

Easy Meal Prep companies tout their convenience, interesting menus that change monthly, and their cost effectiveness. As for convenience, the pitch is that by spending roughly two hours putting meals together you end up with as many as 12 different entrees – three dinners a week for a month. The menus are, in fact, interesting. Our family has tried The Dinner Club in the Chicago suburb of LaGrange, which offers dishes such as herb rubbed pork tenderloin and Argentinean grilled flank steak with black bean vinaigrette. As for cost effectiveness, most of the companies claim that each entrée provides as many as six servings. Let's do the math to see just how cost effective these dinners really are.

According to U.S. government statistics, a family of four spends about $4,800 per year on "Food at Home" and another $3,360 on "Dining Out." Add those figures together for the total amount that 4-person families spend on meals, divide by 365 days, and that comes to $22.36 per day. If we allocate 50% of that cost to dinner, figuring that's the most expensive meal of the day, that's $11.18. Divide that by four people and you get $2.80 per serving.

How does the pricing of Easy Meal Prep companies stack up? We looked at a few menus at a random selection of companies online. Pass Your Plate, with franchises now operating in Oklahoma and expanding to Arkansas and North Carolina, offers 10 meals for $159, each one providing 4-6 servings, according to the company's web site. Assuming an average of 4 servings per entrée, that works out to about $4 per serving. At 5 servings per entrée, that's about $3.20. And if you squeeze 6 servings out of each meal, that works out to about $2.65 per serving.

Dinner MyWay, which has locations mostly in California and some in Texas, Virginia, and Florida, and coming soon to Colorado, Arizona and Utah, offers six meals for $105 and 12 meals for $190. The company claims that each entrée feeds six. If that's right, then 12 dinners feeding six each works out to $2.64 per serving – about the same as the first company.

Presto! Cuisine, a one-store operation in Rochester, Minnesota, offers 12 meals for $180, which they say serves "approximately 6." If so, that works out to $2.50 per serving. An important factor is that most dishes do not come with everything. For example, one company called the Main Dish Kitchen offers a Cordon Bleu Chicken, which comes with rice, but no vegetable. A Dijon Salmon dish includes only the salmon, along with side dish "serving suggestions." At many of the companies, customers can put together desserts, but they cost extra.

You can also have the company put the meals together for you and even deliver them to you, both for extra charges.

Helping drive costs down, at some Easy Meal Prep companies if you arrange for a group of people to come with you, you get a discount of about 20%. Bottom line? The meals are a bit more expensive than cooking from scratch, but not much. And, when you factor in the convenience offered – including the time saved by not having to shop for the ingredients and pull recipes together – plus the enjoyment of making the prep work a group event with friends, the easy meal prep solutions seem to make good sense.

Perhaps the biggest detractors of the Easy Meal Prep business will be the government's accountants who need to figure out how to classify consumer spending on such meals. Hmm, is this "food at home" or "dining out?"