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November 27, 2006

Home cooking help | Entrepreneurs hope meal-assembly businesses will lure busy families who need the convenience of takeout but still want a homemade dinner

By Kerry Elson
Cheryl Nash doesn't have time to slave over home-cooked meals. The Westbrook mom works full-time as an administrator at the University of Southern Maine, so sometimes, she says with a cringe, dinner at her house is frozen Lean Cuisine meals or take out from Applebee's.

But on a recent Saturday morning, Nash says she feels like she's cooking again. Leaning over a counter at Make Thyme for Dinner, a new meal-preparation business in South Portland, Nash spoons grated ginger into a plastic bag of raw, boneless chicken breast, following a recipe for Thai curry chicken. "I'm a working mom, and if I bought ginger it would just sit in my fridge and rot," she says, laughing. She motions to the chopped onion and bell pepper on the counter. "I don't have time to do this."

Nash is a typical customer at Make Thyme for Dinner, which aims to take the time-consuming work out of cooking. Owner Paula Pelczar does almost everything, from menu planning and recipe testing to buying the ingredients and chopping them in advance. She even cleans up afterward. Customers like Nash come in for about two hours and assemble ingredients for several nights' worth of meals, placing them in separate bags to take home, freeze and cook later on.

The business, says Pelczar, is hoping to cash in on busy southern Maine parents like Nash ˆ— people who are too busy to cook from scratch, but still want to eat a healthy, homemade meal. "Everything's raw, [so when] you thaw it and cook it, it tastes like you just made it," she says. As a bonus, Pelczar says, meals from Make Thyme for Dinner also are less expensive than take-out, at around $3 per serving.

The concept behind Make Thyme for Dinner isn't new. Meal-assembly businesses, as owners call them, have been popular in other states for several years, swelling from 50 establishments in 2003 to 1,030 in 2006. Many of those are franchises, and now there's even a trade group for the businesses, the Cheyenne, Wyo.-based Easy Meal Prep Association, which sponsors an annual industry conference and offers guidance to entrepreneurs.

In Maine, however, the shops are just catching on. The first in the state, The Prep Kitchen, opened this July in Freeport. Make Thyme for Dinner followed, opening in early November.
Owners say the business model isn't just more convenient for customers. Compared to other food-service businesses, meal-assembly operations are easier to run. That's partly why their ranks have grown so quickly, says Amy Vasquez, director of public relations for the Easy Meal Prep Association. While a restaurant or a catering company can be a high-stress environment that requires a large staff, one person can run a meal-assembly business ˆ— and that entrepreneur has a clear path to follow.

"They all kind of run the same business model ˆ— they just differ in their marketing or style of entrees," Vasquez says. "It's not like a restaurant where the hours can be completely unmanageable for one person."

Stocking the freezer
Paula Pelczar opened Make Thyme for Dinner after years working full-time as a speech therapist. The Scarborough resident had always liked cooking ˆ— she even ran a small cookie company for a few years on the side ˆ— but without a culinary degree, she didn't feel prepared to open a restaurant. As a working parent, she also feared the time commitment. "You hear stories from people that restaurants own you," she says.

When she saw a feature about meal prep businesses on the Food Network, she did some research, visiting ones in other states and talking to food suppliers. Then she decided to open her own, modeling it on others she liked. "It was more about having business sense [than culinary training], and I love trying new recipes," she says. "I wanted to meet that everyday need."

Wendy Wren, owner of The Prep Kitchen in Freeport, had a similar revelation last year, after she and some friends visited a meal-assembly business in Massachusetts. The North Yarmouth resident recognized a market for something similar back home. "It filled a need that I didn't see filled in the same way yet," Wren says. "And I like doing the prep work. I'm one of those crazy people who can chop onions and peppers and make pizza sauce all day."

Their businesses have a similar set-up. Customers register online for a two-hour slot, then choose from a list of about 15 meals ˆ— from fiesta chicken and rice bake to barbecue beef tips ˆ— that change month to month. Customers can opt to make as many meals at once as they like ˆ— the largest available package, 12 meals that each serve six, costs around $200 at both places.

From there, Pelczar and Wren check the sign-up list to determine how much food to order and prepare. When customers come in, the ingredients for each dish are set out on large metal carts that have a plastic counter, a trough for bowls of chopped ingredients and a refrigerated cabinet underneath for items like chicken broth or coconut milk. Cooking utensils are piled neatly on shelves to the side. The real kitchens, where Pelczar and Wren do the chopping and dishwashing, are hidden in back. (For more on how the process works, see "Follow the recipe," below.)

During her first week, Pelczar had 16 customers, mostly working parents. Some had just stopped in, curious about the sign out front. Others responded to an advertisement she'd run on a radio station. She's already had repeat customers, she says.
Business hasn't always been smooth. Before Pelczar opened for the public earlier this month, she held a two-week soft opening for friends to help work out the kinks. "Our first sessions were very chaotic," she says.

Once, she discovered she hadn't chopped enough red bell pepper for the Thai curry chicken station, so after customers left she had to race to the store, finish assembling the meals herself, and then deliver them by hand that night. "Thank God it was all friends," she says with a laugh. "[Now] I feel more like I know what I'm doing."

Too many cooks?
At The Prep Kitchen, Wren says her client base has grown steadily since she opened five months ago, to 30-40 customers a week. She's seen not only working parents, but also
single people, retirees and vacationers on their way to Sugarloaf.

She's convinced Beth Goldman, a first-time customer who signed up with her mom earlier this month. Standing behind one of the stations, Goldman says she'll probably be back the following week. Since having a baby four months ago, she hasn't had time to cook, yet she likes putting together ingredients for the meals she chose ˆ— honey lime chicken and orange molasses chicken. "With this, if there's something I don't like, I can just leave it out," Goldman says. "I like knowing what's in the food."

Make Thyme for Dinner and The Prep Kitchen may not have the Maine market to themselves for much longer. The Easy Meal Prep Association predicts another 70 such shops will open in the United States before year's end, and that by 2010, there will be over 3,000 of them.

Pelczar isn't worried. "I think there's room," she says, because there's still a large, untapped market here.

Wren says she plans to emphasize what makes her business different: She uses locally produced ingredients when possible and always has whole grains like brown rice and whole wheat pasta. She also might feature organic ingredients, possibly buying organic Wolfe's Neck Farm beef from New Gloucester-based Pineland Farms Natural Meats.

For now, she's growing the business conservatively. It's already a lot to manage while she raises a family, she says. As a result, she often brings meals from The Prep Kitchen home for dinner, because she finds she no longer has time to cook from scratch. "It's funny," she says, "because I'm juggling as much as my customers are."

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