There are plenty of ways to make money. You might not consider yourself much of an athlete or bodybuilder, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money off of selling healthy meals (or meal prep).
What Is Meal Prep?
The concept of “meal prep” involves planning meals for the entire week to ensure that you are eating healthy no matter what. Meal prep is a growing trend since there are not many cheap but healthy options in the fast-food space.
One of the reasons why meal prep is popular is because consumers end up saving money through their meals. They can store them in Tupperware, heat them up as needed, and get back to their personal and professional lives. Of course, there are many things to consider before you start selling meal prep. Here are ways you can start a meal prep business from your own home, as long as you have the right entrepreneurial mindset necessary.
Why Selling Meal Prep is Profitable?
Cheap Overhead
One of the keys to starting a meal prep business is very simple: you should stack up on Tupperware. When you consider the overhead of many businesses, this doesn’t seem like much of an obstacle, does it? Head over to Amazon or any other retailer to find a great deal on Tupperware in bulk amounts. Obviously, you might not want to purchase thousands of Tupperware containers if you don’t have a consumer base established yet.
Protein/Veggies
There are all sorts of diets out there that recommend certain ingredients – but a meal prep company should really be focused on protein and vegetables. Your customers might be in the gym often and focused on bodybuilding, and chicken is a tasty and cheap way to ensure that they have enough protein with their meals.
You might want to consider offering fish in your meal preps to switch things up. It should be noted that you will increase profit margins if you purchase in bulk. There are many options with vegetables, but you might want to include broccoli and corn as traditional choices. Remember not to use too much salt since it can always be added later!
How Much Should I Charge For Meal Prepping?
With $100, you can offer meal prep for seven to eight customers! If you are trying to figure out a solid price point, you might want to consider charging $70 or $80 per week. After all, there are huge corporations that are involved in the meal prep sector that are charging $15 to $20 per meal.
You don’t have to deal with any of their overhead, which means there’s a good chance that customers might want to choose your meal prep service instead. If you have eight customers paying $80 per week, that’s $640 a week off of $100 worth of food! It’s easy to see how the numbers can add up and you might end upscaling the business. Of course, this also depends on quality, branding, etc.
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How To Start Selling Meal Prep?
Customers
Okay, so you’ve started a meal prep business, but do you have any customers? You should consider Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist as some obvious options. One obvious strategy is to market to nearby gyms in any creative way that you can, whether it’s through business cards, flyers, or word of mouth.
An advanced way to getting more customers would be to start a blog. Now, this is a little complex and takes a lot of work. But if you are interested in following this method, check out our article here on blogging.
How To Grow Your Selling Meal Prep Business?
What would lead to your meal prep business growing quicker than ever? You might want to consider partnering up with a chef to make sure that your meals are as delicious as possible. This could be a great opportunity for you to offer equity in the company or a salary to ensure that your business is scalable.
Of course, you should only consider a chef once it’s clear that you already have an established customer base. One obvious way to improve meals is to ask for customer feedback, whether it’s in person or otherwise.
Consider Diets
There is certainly one challenge when it comes to starting a meal prep business, and that’s figuring out how you will cater to those with very particular diets. How will your meal prep business ever grow if it can’t acknowledge the fact that veganism has grown exponentially over the years?
There are plenty of trends out there, and the Paleo diet and Keto diet are quite popular, as well. You should figure out if it’s worth creating newer dishes to offer some variety and attract a new demographic.
Laws And Location
Following The Law
Last, but not least, what about the local laws? There are some very obvious health concerns about anyone starting a business involving food, so this will require some extensive research on your part. Selling meal prep might not require a lot of overhead – but you certainly should figure out the city and the state laws regarding the sector.
The last thing that you want is to operate outside of the law when it comes to selling meal prep (serving any type of food) because that might end up affecting your personal and professional life for a long time. You should do everything you can to make sure that you are complying with all regulations that exist, wherever you are.
Register Business
Of course, you also will want to figure out how you want your business to operate. Are you setting up an LLC? Are you involving business partners? How many business partners will there be, and do they all understand their role and equity in the company?
Conclusion
There are some individuals that already eat healthy, and selling meal prep might be a natural offshoot of their other entrepreneurial ventures. With the right marketing/branding, it’s easy to see how people in cities all over the world can actually end up making thousands of dollars per week off of dozens of customers just by selling meal prep to them.
Whether this is just a side hustle so that you can pay your rent, or a company that you are hoping to scale – a meal prep business can definitely help your financial situation. One benefit is that you might also be inspired to live healthier due to being around such healthy food all of the time!