A meal prep business plan sets out the meals you'll cook, who orders them and how, what a meal costs and sells for, the kitchen and delivery, and the first year month by month. Meal prep has a shape that suits a plan: customers order and pay before you cook, so you buy for orders rather than guesses, and the fixed costs are small when the kitchen is rented by the hour. The catch is the margin. Each meal leaves only a few dollars, so the business is volume, and small slips in yield or waste come straight out of the profit. In the example below, a meal prep cook reaches 1,300 meals a month by month 11, about 21 weekly-plan customers plus single orders, makes a small profit from month 1, and ends the year about $24,400 ahead on top of paying for the cooking. Below is a description example, each part of the plan, the projection, what moves the margin, and a free template.
The short version
- Describe the business in a paragraph: the meals, the customers, the kitchen, the goals.
- Cost a meal: ingredients at their cooked yield, container, labor, kitchen time, delivery and fees.
- Offer single meals and a weekly plan; the plan is cheaper per meal and steadier for you.
- Take orders and payment before you cook, so you buy only what's ordered.
- Watch the cooked yield of your main protein: it's the biggest number that moves.
- Count the customers who cancel, and plan to replace them every month.
- TaroStack turns the week's orders into what to cook and buy, and costs every batch from what you paid. More below.
Part 1: the business description
Windward Roots, the made-up taro business I use in these examples, adds weekly meal prep. Its description reads:
Windward Roots Kitchen cooks island-style prepared meals, kalua pork with taro, shoyu chicken, and seasonal vegetable bowls, in a licensed commercial kitchen rented by the hour on Oʻahu. Customers order by Thursday for delivery on Sunday, one meal at a time or as a weekly plan of ten. Every meal carries its cook date, use-by date and allergens. In the first year we plan to cook 1,300 meals a month.
Part 2: what a meal costs
The costs come from meal prep business startup cost, where a meal is worked out line by line:
| Per meal | Single meal | Weekly plan |
|---|---|---|
| Ingredients: kalua pork, taro, greens, sauce | $3.60 | $3.60 |
| Container, lid and label | $0.62 | $0.62 |
| Labor: 2 people × 6 hours at $20, over 100 meals | $2.40 | $2.40 |
| Kitchen: 6 hours at $25, over 100 meals | $1.50 | $1.50 |
| Delivery | $1.02 | $0.60 |
| Card and ordering fees, 3% | $0.42 | $0.38 |
| Variable cost | $9.56 | $9.10 |
Delivery is cheaper on a plan because ten meals go to one door. The kitchen is rented by the hour, so it's a variable cost here, not a fixed one; what a commissary charges, membership against hourly, is in commissary kitchen cost.
Part 3: customers and prices
| Meal | Price | Variable cost | Contribution | Meals a month at full speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single meal | $14.00 | $9.56 | $4.44 | 400 |
| Weekly plan of 10, per meal | $12.50 | $9.10 | $3.40 | 900 |
A plan meal leaves a dollar less than a single meal, and it's worth it: plan customers order every week without being asked, which is what lets you buy ingredients and book kitchen hours with confidence. Nine hundred plan meals a month is about 21 customers taking ten meals a week.
Part 4: operations
| Area | In the plan |
|---|---|
| Kitchen | A licensed commercial kitchen by the hour; prep days booked a month ahead |
| Ordering | Orders and payment close Thursday; cook Saturday; deliver Sunday |
| Recipes | Written per batch, with the cooked yield of each protein |
| Labels | Name, ingredients, allergens, cook date, use-by date and your business |
| Food safety | Permits, a certified food manager, cooling and cold holding records |
| Delivery | Insulated bags and coolers; a route planned by area |
Licensing for prepared meals is set by your state and county, and meal prep usually needs a licensed kitchen rather than a home one; ask your local health department before you budget. How to scale a home recipe to 100 portions is in scaling recipes for production.
Part 5: the first year, month by month
Sales start at 15% of full speed and reach 100% by month 11, against $705 of fixed costs a month: insurance, the ordering website and software, marketing and samples, freezer and storage space, and a phone and card reader.
| Month | Single meals | Plan meals | Sales | Profit | Cash, year to date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60 | 135 | $2,528 | $20 | $20 |
| 2 | 80 | 180 | $3,370 | $262 | $283 |
| 3 | 100 | 225 | $4,213 | $504 | $787 |
| 4 | 120 | 270 | $5,055 | $746 | $1,532 |
| 5 | 160 | 360 | $6,740 | $1,229 | $2,762 |
| 6 | 200 | 450 | $8,425 | $1,713 | $4,475 |
| 7 | 240 | 540 | $10,110 | $2,197 | $6,671 |
| 8 | 280 | 630 | $11,795 | $2,680 | $9,352 |
| 9 | 320 | 720 | $13,480 | $3,164 | $12,515 |
| 10 | 360 | 810 | $15,165 | $3,647 | $16,163 |
| 11 | 400 | 900 | $16,850 | $4,131 | $20,294 |
| 12 | 400 | 900 | $16,850 | $4,131 | $24,425 |
The year's sales are $114,580, and the profit is $24,425, on top of paying $20 an hour for the cooking. Because customers pay when they order, before the food is bought, the real cash comes in sooner than this table shows.
Part 6: what moves the margin
At $3.40 to $4.44 a meal, the margin is thin enough that three things decide the year:
| What changes | Effect a month at full speed |
|---|---|
| Pork cooks down to 54% of its raw weight instead of 60% | −$303 |
| Cooking 5% more meals than were ordered, 65 at $8.12 | −$528 |
| Single-meal price up from $14 to $15, after the card fee | +$388 |
The yield is the easiest one to miss. Kalua pork that loses more weight in the oven than the recipe assumed needs 11% more raw pork for the same 150 g portion, 23 cents a meal across 1,300 meals. Weigh it raw and cooked on every batch, and the cost per meal is real; how a cooked yield goes into a cost is in plate cost formula.
Customers leaving is the other number. If 1 in 10 plan customers cancels each month, keeping 21 means finding two new ones every month to stand still.
Part 7: the startup budget
| Item | Example |
|---|---|
| Health permit and business license | $600 |
| Food manager certification | $150 |
| Kitchen deposit and first month | $1,000 |
| Containers, lids and labels for the first 2,000 meals | $1,240 |
| Scale, sealer, label printer | $500 |
| Insulated bags and coolers for delivery | $350 |
| Product liability insurance, first year | $900 |
| Ordering website | $300 |
| Launch marketing | $500 |
| Working cash | $2,500 |
| Total to start | $8,040 |
Insurance for a small food business, and what each policy covers, is in insurance for small food business.
Get the template
Download the meal prep business plan template. Type your meals with their price, variable cost and monthly volume at full speed, your fixed costs and startup budget, and how fast customers will come; it works out each month's sales, profit and cash, the first month with a profit and the lowest cash point. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.
Where this stops working
On Thursday night the orders close: 21 plans, 94 single meals, six different dishes, two customers with no sesame. Someone turns that into a shopping list by hand, guesses how much raw pork makes 640 portions, books the kitchen, and prints labels with use-by dates. On Monday a customer calls about Sunday's shoyu chicken, and nobody can say which chicken went into which tray.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack turns the week's orders into what to cook and buy, and keeps every meal traceable.
Orders to a shopping list. Each order is a sales order for its delivery date. Planning, on Standard, works out what to cook and what to buy, and by when, through each dish's recipe and yield, counting what's already in the walk-in.
Every batch, at its real yield. Each dish is a recipe, with sub-recipes for sauces and marinades and a scrap % for what the oven takes, and units convert: buy pork by the case, cook by the pound. Recording a batch takes ingredients off stock from the lots used, at what you paid, and divides by the portions that came out good. Recipe truth checks, from your own batch history, whether a recipe yields what it claims, so a yield slipping from 60% to 54% shows up.
And every tray, traced. Each batch goes into a lot with its use-by date, lot labels print with its code, and one report walks any lot to the customers who got it and back to the ingredient lots inside. Margins are reported by product and by customer.
| The job | Spreadsheet and notebook | In TaroStack |
|---|---|---|
| Orders to shopping list | Thursday night, by hand | Planning, through recipes and yields, on Standard |
| Raw pork for 640 portions | A guess | From the recipe and your own batch history |
| Cost per meal | Worked out once | Every batch, at what you paid |
| Sunday's chicken, which lot? | Nobody knows | The lot on the label, traced to its supplier |
Recipes, batches, lots, lot labels and margins are on every plan, from $49 a month; planning is on Standard at $99. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.