Is a Meal Prep Business Profitable
If you are looking to create a meal kit delivery business, I'm going to give you 10 steps, solid steps, to get you up and running with your meal kit delivery business right now. Welcome back, all right. This is Marketing Food Online, and I am going to give you guys 10 steps to get a meal kit delivery business started, and I'm going to also give you some information about how to get it running efficiently, quickly, and online, and we're going to get to it right now. So, the first and most important thing about any business, whether or not your state requires it, and many states do not require it if you are starting from home, is to incorporate yourself.Okay, you need to incorporate yourself as a business.
Listen to "Ultimate Guide to Meal Kit Delivery Business" on Spreaker.
Do not do this as a hobby on the side when you're preparing food. If you happen to be doing it so far and handing it to friends and giving it out to family and friends, that's one thing, okay. When you get into the business realm, the business world, and you start doing this as a full-time business, you carry a lot of liability. In order for you to kind of divert that liability from your personal assets, from your house, your car, and everything you own, you need to separate yourself as a business entity. You need to do that, okay?
Can You Sell Meal Kits From Home
Most of the time, I recommend to a lot of the clients I do my consulting that LLCs work perfectly fine when you start. Okay, That's going to limit the amount of liability you're going to take on, and it's going to protect any of your personal assets, so if anything were to happen, somebody gets sick, or has an allergic reaction, or something like that when it comes to food, which potentially could happen, the liability's really going to be transitioned over to your business and not yourself. So number one, incorporate. Kepp in mind if your asking Can You Sell Meal Kits From Home that . Number two, the second wave of protection, I guess you could say, is that you want to make sure you get some type of food producer's insurance. Okay, So I'm going to give you after, just really quick by the way, I'm going to give you these 10 and down in the description below this video, I'll give you links to, you can actually create an LLC online, get yourself some insurance, and any of the other things that I give you right now, I'm going to give you some additional resources down below, okay? So number two is insurance. Why do I need insurance, Damian?
Can I Start a meal prep Business From Home
Well, here's the thing. The LLC will protect you. Okay, insurance for your food production is going to give you even more protection. If it happens to you, you've got to pay out some kind of compensation. If you go through litigation, and God forbid this happens, if somebody gets sick and you've got to pay out something, your insurance policy is for that purpose. It's for your business, not you. Your business. So food producer's insurance is number two. Before we get to the next step keep in mind when asking Can I Start a meal Prep Business From Home that . Number three. All right, so you want to create a meal kit delivery business. Now the next question is, what are you going to make? You need to create a recipe, or a line of dinners, lunches, or to-go items. Whatever it is that you're looking to make, write it down and figure out what your focus is.
How do Meal Kit Companies Work
And here's what I mean. Are you going to do gluten-free? Are you going to follow a low-carbohydrate diet?Maybe low sugar? Are you going to do some type of diabetic meal? What specifically is going to be your niche in food delivery meal kits? Okay, Now a lot of times, some people go out and they create this enormous menu of stuff, but they don't really have a focus as to specifically kind of honing in on one particular type of food, be it lunch or dinner or meal. So you want to make sure you're kind of focused on one thing, because that's going to be a big part of your marketing campaign when you start to promote or market this. So for instance, as an example, if you make diabetic-type foods that are very low in sugar and are very friendly to diabetic recipes, you want to make sure that you're focused on that, because as you begin to promote it, let's say, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, you could hone in on that specific group of people who need or are looking for those types of meal kits.
How do You Charge for Meal prepping
Okay, So number three is to write it down. Spell it out, figure out exactly what it is you want to hone in on, and you want to perfect it, okay. Number four. How do you want to ship these meals? And here's what I mean. There are a huge variety of companies out there that are offering all kinds of meal kits. Some of them arrive frozen. Okay, some of them ship fresh foods.Now it's very important to figure out which one's going to work best for your product if you're looking for quality and that type of quality when it comes to the product that they're going to get. And here's what I mean by that. If you start to ship fresh foods, you're going to end up having to use, potentially, you're going to have to use either some ice packs or dry ice to keep the temperature of those products during transit. They're going to have to arrive in a way that's not going to be spoiled, that's not going to be hindered by temperatures.
And a lot of times, a lot of companies end up going the frozen route because they'll make the meal kit, freeze it, and then ship it overnight or do a two-day delivery with either dry ice or ice packs. And frozen seems to be the most popular one, because in transit, if it happens to fluctuate the temperature inside of the box, you need to keep that in mind. Frozen meals will last much longer than if they were fresh, because there's a really small fine line of freshness when it comes to temperature, and you have to maintain that, so keep that in mind. Figure out how you want to ship it. I personally would recommend that you do your meal kits frozen. Nothing is wrong with that.Number five. The size of your shipping box So, now you've figured out what you're going to make. You gotta figure out how you're going to ship it, how you're going to ship it to your customers. Next up, how are you going to box it?
What's going to make sense? What size, how small, what shape of a box is going to work well? Are you going to get an insulated box for shipping? Or are you simply going to use some ice packs and a standard shipping carton? That is what you have to figure out. And I would recommend too, this is something we did, not necessarily, we don't have meal kits, but when we started shipping cookies and baked goods, we would ship, so we experimented, and we shipped some of those to ourselves, okay. And I would see that it either showed up melted if it's chocolate pretzels, for instance. If it was melted, then I needed to go higher up on the ice packs. If it was damaged, then I need to figure out how to ship it a little safer to prevent it from breaking. So do some experimenting with shipping it to yourself. So number five is to figure out what size shipping box you need. Number six. You need to figure out where there is a commercial kitchen that I could do this in close to me. Can you do this from home? Potentially, you could. Under cottage food laws, you're really not allowed to do that as far as prepared meals are concerned. It's considered potentially hazardous.
So the idea of making meals at home and shipping them is not going to work. Technically, it's not legal. Okay, But commercial kitchens, if you rented out a commercial kitchen, you could prepare the meals that you've accumulated as far as your orders, and then I'm going to get into that in a minute. I'm going to explain to you how that works too. So you can get those, accumulate them, ship them, make them from your commercial kitchen, and you're done. So you're not transporting anything home. Nothing is being made at home. It's all being done in a licensed facility, and you're good to go. Number seven. Are you going to deliver local or online? So you've got your commercial kitchen. Right? So you've prepared your meals and you're set to go. Are you getting and accumulating these orders locally, just from word of mouth to start? To be honest with you, that's a good way to do it. Or are you going to do it online? Okay, so if you're going to do it online, the challenge there is trying to get traffic to your website. Getting people to know about your meal kit delivery business online is a huge challenge. So I would recommend starting locally and letting people spread the word.
Tell them to spread the word. Tell them to tell their friends or family, anyone about it. And that way, you can create the product in your commercial kitchen, take them and deliver them locally, and you're good to go. Now, of course, make sure that you've got the right licensing, permits, and such to do this in regards to preparing and delivering, okay? Because I say this, cities and counties, not only states, cities and counties will have different types of permits and licensing requirements for meal kit delivery businesses, okay? And that's a simple thing. You just go down to your business development office in your city, tell them you're there to apply for your business license, obviously, tell them what you're making, what you're doing, and they'll classify you accordingly, okay. So, number eight. Pick a day. If this is going to be a monthly, however you're setting this up. If it's bi-weekly or monthly, pick a specific day that you're going to rent the commercial kitchen. And within that timeframe that you're renting the commercial kitchen, you need to make sure you're preparing all of the meals that you need to get done. Here's what I mean. Most commercial kitchens either rent hourly or by blocks of hours. So they'll say either, hey, you got the commercial kitchen for an hour, it's $200.
Or it's three hours for $200, or whatever it may be. So in that timeframe that you're using that space, make sure that you can produce what you're selling. Do not go to a commercial kitchen, prepare meals, and then try to sell them. You need to accumulate orders in order to make it worthwhile renting a commercial kitchen. Okay, So in the timeframe that you're renting the kitchen, you're not going there to just randomly make 100 meals and then cross your fingers and hope that you can drive around selling them. You don't want to do that. You want to create the buzz first. You need to accumulate orders before you even go to a commercial kitchen. "Look, I'm going to ship it once a month, and here's how many orders I have," you say.Go in there and utilize the time most efficiently. That's the best way to do it. Otherwise, you're just gon na be broke. You're not going to make any money.
The profit's gon na be gone. Number nine. promoting it through social media. So even if you're starting local, there are a lot of great social media platforms out there, from Facebook to Twitter and Instagram, to create a local buzz. Okay, But you may have to go out and start, you know, letting your friends know and your family know. Let them tell their friends and family, and then say, "Hey, check out our social media pages." Check out our website. So, obviously, promoting, tying, and sinking your website with social media locally is a great way to spread the word.And you can run specials, you can run discounts, you can let people know about it on social media. Let them know on Twitter and hit them up on Instagram. Hey, check out our website. Get 20% off meal kits this week. So you have to promote it, you have to market it, okay? Also, number ten.If you want to go online and you want to create a meal kit delivery business, I would recommend you check out Cratejoy.com. And again, in the description, hit the link on Cratejoy.com.
If you haven't heard of them, they are a website. They are like the Amazon of subscription businesses. So you could go to Cratejoy.com and literally create a subscription business right on their platform, because what's great about it is that they have traffic, they literally have the SEO set in place, their algorithm, and everything to get people to come to Cratejoy.com for the purpose of subscription boxes. So if you're looking to create a presence online, you can do it that way. Okay, So those are my 10 tips.
Of course, remember, none of this will help you, none of this will allow you to succeed without obviously putting the work in. You need to hustle, hustle, hustle. Rely on your hustle to create success for yourself. These 10 tips won't magically happen without you, okay. So if that was helpful, let me know if you have any questions about the meal kit business. Ask me down below, and I can give you some tips and pointers on it, okay? So good luck, and we'll see you guys in the