Call it a resurgence in home cooking, but the meal prep industry has been steadily growing in recent years, and it’s expected to reach $28 billion by 2028.
Whether you’re a hungry entrepreneur or a gifted cook ready to share your dishes with the world, the market appears ready and willing to give meal prep businesses a shot. Learn how to start your own unique high-quality meal prep business—from scratch.
Table of contents
How to start a meal prep business
- Establish your business and obtain permits
- Rent space in a commissary kitchen
- Choose a niche
- Find suppliers
- Choose a format
- Streamline packaging
- Find a delivery partner
- Invest in high-quality photography
- Set up your ecommerce store
- Develop a marketing strategy
- Evolve with customer feedback
Restaurant, bakery, or meal prep company—every food service business requires a network of suppliers and distributors, and a reliable space to prep and cook your dishes. Here’s everything—and everyone—you’ll need to get your meal prep business off the ground.
1. Establish your business and obtain permits
Your meal preparation business involves all the basic steps of starting any kind of business:
- Choosing a business structure
- Developing a business plan
- Securing financing
- Opening a business bank account
- Obtaining business licenses
Since you’ll be handling food, the licensing process for a meal prep business will be more involved. In addition to a business license and employer identification number, you’ll likely require a food handler’s license (or catering license), health department permits, and compliance with safety regulations.
Keep in mind, specific regulations vary state by state (and sometimes by city), so look at your specific area’s requirements. In some cases (if you’re a New York–based meal prep entrepreneur, for example), you’ll need to take courses to attain these certificates and permits. Inquire about safety standards at any shared kitchen, ingredient supplier, or distributor you’re considering, too.
2. Rent space in a commissary kitchen
Working out of your own kitchen is legal in some states, with caveats and classifications, like the type of food you’re selling and the city in which you’re selling it. You’ll need to follow strict regulations based on where you live, like registering your kitchen, labeling packaging as “Made in a home kitchen,” or having household members sell your product.
A commercial kitchen, also known as a commissary kitchen, will provide you with most of the equipment—and optimal refrigeration storage space—to prepare meals at scale. Some locations may allow you to host cooking classes or in-person events, which can engage new customers and increase brand awareness.
Most kitchens require that you obtain business licenses and permits before they’ll rent you space, but they may help you navigate the process. Have a list of the equipment you’ll need (like a tortilla making machine or a large-scale food processor, for example) and look for kitchens that can provide it.
3. Choose a niche
Even if you’ll be the only meal prep business in town, it’s still a good idea to focus on a specific niche. Identify your target audience (e.g., busy families looking for kid-friendly healthy meals), a gap in the market (like low-priced everyday lunches), and a particular culinary specialty. Deciding on a niche allows you to hone your marketing strategy and demonstrate your commitment to a distinct customer base.
Focusing your product offerings will let you market a few perfect dishes rather than offer a wide range of average meals. For example, it might be easier to develop and market a lineup of Italian dinners than sell a combination of breakfast smoothies, artisanal ramen lunches, and Italian dinners.
4. Find suppliers
Depending on your menu and how often you plan on changing it, you’ll likely use ingredients from various suppliers. You might source from different suppliers seasonally: local farms in spring and summer and wholesale distributors or grocery stores in the offseason, for example. You might source specialty ingredients for only a few dishes (a local brand of mozzarella for your lasagnas and pizzas, for instance) and use affordable wholesale products for the rest.
Find the combination of suppliers that suits your budget and vision. Verify their health and safety standards, pricing and order minimums (or bulk discounts), and reliability with orders and delivery. Don’t be afraid to test various suppliers for quality—your meals can only be as good as their ingredients, so make sure the ingredients are top-notch.
5. Choose a format
There are a variety of meal prep business styles to choose from. Pick one that makes sense with your schedule, business plan, and target market’s needs. Here are a few choices you’ll need to make:
Ingredients or pre-assembled meals
You can take the uncooked, pre-prepped approach of many meal kit subscriptions like Blue Apron, HelloFresh, or Purple Carrot, which provide portioned ingredients and recipes. Alternatively, you can offer pre-cooked and pre-portioned “heat and eat” style meals designed for busy lifestyles and easy calorie-counting.
Subscription or order on-demand
Subscription models provide predictability, which can be vital with fresh food that spoils quickly. You’ll know how many meals you need to make and when, so you can order the right amount of ingredients. But it can be hard to build a subscriber base in a new market as an unknown brand. Offering on-demand meals might make it easier to find new customers, but you’ll need to source ingredients on short notice.
Pick-up or delivery
You can allow same-day pick-up from your commercial kitchen space or deliver directly to customers, either on your own or through a third-party delivery service. Delivering meals isn’t as easy as delivering other products—if you opt to start a meal prep delivery business, account for refrigeration or freezing, and ensure pre-cooked meals are transported right-side-up.
6. Streamline packaging
Getting meals safely from your kitchen to your customers’ tables requires thoughtful packaging. Whether you’re offering local pick-up or working with a food delivery business, you’ll likely need insulated cooler bags, ice packs, and sturdy containers. Preventing or containing leaks and heat loss can help guarantee customers enjoy your meals.
Include cooking or reheating instructions and recipes for meal kits. You don’t need to add nutrition labels unless you make more than $500,000 in annual gross sales, but you might want to include this information if your brand emphasizes healthy food and fitness nutrition. You’ll need to include it if you make any health or nutrition claims like “sugar free.” You can use a meal prep software service like GoPrep to generate nutrition information and print labels.
7. Find a delivery partner
Many delivery partners use a business model similar to Postmates, DoorDash, or UberEats, with drivers completing local pick-ups and drop-offs. Depending on the number and location of your customers, you could also reserve certain days to deliver meals yourself. As your delivery radius expands, you can ship through national carriers like UPS or FedEx.
8. Invest in high-quality photography
Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus may have inspired generations of gourmands to search for their next great meal, but it was a first-century Roman named Apicius who first noted: we eat with our eyes first. Take his advice by prioritizing high-quality visual assets and colorful, well-lit product photography for your meal prep business.
Food photography comes with its own considerations, so if you feel overwhelmed by the more technical elements, consider hiring a professional photographer who can bring your vision to life.
9. Set up your ecommerce store
Your meal prep business plan is set, recipes perfected, ingredients ordered, and business legally cleared to operate in your area. Now it’s time to set up an ecommerce store that shows off your meals and makes it easy for customers to purchase. A platform like Shopify allows you to make small edits to elements like prices and ingredients quickly, and easily update or change meal pages and layouts as needed.
You’ll want to follow a few steps to make sure you create a stellar website. Incorporate web design to match your brand identity. To aid navigation, create product categories—and make sure to write compelling descriptions for each meal.
Provide a seamless checkout experience and accept the payment methods most popular among your customer base. To ensure your ecommerce store shows up in Google search results, incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) best practices into your website copy.
A great ecommerce conversion rate is over 3%, but don’t worry if your rate is lower when you first launch your site. You can employ strategies like offering a free meal, adding call to action (CTA) buttons, and reducing frictions like slow load times to improve sales.
10. Develop a marketing strategy
Customers can easily place orders on your ecommerce store, but how can you get them to your site and encourage them to purchase? A host of marketing tactics can help you hook potential customers and lead them through the sales funnel. For the best results, use a combination of strategies and channels for the best results.
For example, you might consider posting cooking tutorials as part of a social media marketing strategy. You could blog about the origins of your brand as part of a content marketing strategy. Notify customers of sales and discounts as part of an email and SMS marketing strategy. Maintain a consistent brand voice across your various communications channels, and don’t be afraid to test new types of content until you find what resonates with your audience.
If you’re running a hyper-local meal prep business, consider using print advertising, like flyers and newspaper ads. Pop-up at your local farmers market or craft fair to give potential customers a taste of your cooking.
11. Evolve with customer feedback
Like a crusty loaf of bread, you don’t want your business to go stale. But when you feel like it’s time to tweak your menu or alter your prices, how can you know how your customers will respond? And how can you be sure customers like your new packaging or product pages you designed? To be certain, you’ll want to solicit customer feedback.
There are a number of ways to gather customer feedback, including:
- Social media and review sites. Check comments and direct messages on your business’s social media pages, scan for brand mentions across platforms, and look at review sites like Google and Yelp to see what people are saying about your business online.
- Customer feedback surveys and polls. If you’re curious how customers feel about a certain aspect of your business, surveys and polls are a great way to find out. You can send surveys to customers via email or text message, or you can integrate them into your ecommerce site.
- Feedback widgets. These website pop-ups are short and sweet: They might require only a couple clicks from the user, and their ease often translates to high response rates. Shopify offers a number of feedback apps.
Gathering and responding to customer feedback is an ongoing process, and you’ll want to keep a pulse on your customers’ opinions as you evolve your business.
Meal prep business example: Eat Well Nashville
Eat Well Nashville began as a way to help customers eat healthy on a hectic schedule.
“There was really no one that offered what we wanted. We tried every service, we tried all the national services, we tried CSAs, and nothing was quite convenient enough and nothing resonated with us in terms of product quality,” co-founder Spencer Donaldson says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We were looking for something that was healthy with clean ingredients that we could just pop in the microwave or the oven.”
Spencer set up a Shopify storefront and found a niche. Eat Well Nashville evolved its initial focus to target fitness-focused individuals looking for healthy recipes. That meant, per Spencer, a lot of brown rice and plain chicken. It wasn’t long before the company’s customer base got bored.
Spencer and his team continuously solicited customer feedback and improved their products in response.
“We were pretty relentless about surveying our customers,” Spencer says. “We realized from those surveys that the people who are ordering are not necessarily just people in the fitness industry, or people who do CrossFit. There was a much greater market with busy executives and people who had families and not much time. So we had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make healthy recipes that tasted amazing.”
The company upped the flavor profiles of their offerings, incorporating more spice-forward recipes for tastier meals—and made sure to show this off in their food photography.
“If those [meals] don’t look great, we’re not going to receive orders—even if they taste great. Plate setting has been big for us,” Spencer says. We’re very conscious about the colors. Building out a good lighting studio has been key.”
Spencer and his team also made sure to pose a question that many companies forget to ask: How do customers want to be marketed to?
“We had a lot of people ask for text message marketing because they were forgetting to order by our order cut-off day,” Spencer says.
Spencer’s story highlights an essential tip for any meal prep entrepreneur: Let your customers tell you how they want your meals to fit into their lives—then deliver. Since starting Eat Well Nashville, the company has been acquired by their fellow Tennesseans at My Vibrant Meals.
How to start a meal prep business FAQ
How much does it cost to start a meal prep business?
Most meal prep start-ups need anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 to cover ongoing ingredient costs, staffing (if you plan to hire employees), packaging, shipping, marketing, and any overheads associated with renting a commercial kitchen space. If your state allows it, you can also start a small meal prep business in your home kitchen. The total cost to start a meal prep business will vary depending on your target market, the frequency of your orders, the complexity of your recipes, and more. You can always apply for small business funding to get started.
How do I start a small meal prep business from home?
Check if your state allows home kitchens and which licenses, permits or registrations are required to operate a food business in your state. Once you have the necessary paperwork and approved space to prepare and pack your meals, you can place orders for ingredients and packaging, create high-quality visual assets of your products, set up your online store, and begin marketing your business.
Can you use Shopify’s ecommerce platform for a meal prep business?
Yes, you can use Shopify to host your online meal prep business, process orders, and easily track shipping and delivery status.
