Help with business idea for kids' meals?

[beachedbanana]

Hello!

If you have a baby or a toddler, would you be interested in buying freshly made, non UPF "ready meals" for them?

The idea is to hire a commercial kitchen to prepare meals for customers to collect once a week.

I'd do mixed trays of purées for babies age 6-12m, and small portion meals for 12m+

For example, for a baby you could pre-order an ice cube style tray with a selection of veg and fruit purées, and 2 kinds of baked finger foods/snacks a week.

For 12m+, you could order 4 (?) different meals, plus portions of the baked snacks.

I'd focus on nutrient dense foods, plenty of beans, lentils, veg, nuts etc, no UPF. I'd use reusable packaging that people could return to be cleaned and re-filled.

If you would be interested, how much would you pay? Does £25 a week sound reasonable for the baby version, and £35 for toddlers? Would you be happy with an appointment time to come and collect the food?

I live in a middle class area with lots of young families. I have previously worked as a chef (I have a different, dull job at the moment). I have a 4 yo and a 1 yo.

I'd need to sit down and thoroughly work out costs and if it's viable. But I'd love to hear what people think of the idea... Also if you know of anyone doing similar please let me know/link their websites.

Thanks so much in advance!

I wouldn't - I would rather cook for my kids. But I'm sure there are plenty of cash-rich time-poor working mums in affluent areas who would.

Honestly no I wouldn't spend £25 a week to feed my 6 month old baby but I wouldn't buy a jar or pouch for my baby either.

I have no doubt there are families who would be quite happy to though

I think it’s a great idea…I’d probably be more likely to do it once/twice a month if the meals were suitable to freeze rather than every week?
I think the costs are very reasonable!
I'm sure you absolutely know this but only mentioning since it wasn’t in the OP that you’d need to be very explicit about allergens.
Plenty people use meal prep as adults either for a short period or sometimes long term when they can afford it. I’m sure there would be a market for babies and toddlers too as lots of people are much more bothered about giving their kids healthy meals than themselves.
A lot of people are also steering away from purées and just going straight in with BLW…maybe you could develop it further later and do family portions for the parent(s) to eat too?

Thanks for your comments.

Yes, I was thinking of parents who work full-time maybe, who don't have loads of time for preparing meals, need fast and convenient food but don't want to give their kids a load of sugary junk from a jar.

I would need to make sure enough of those parents exist near me and that they know about what I'm offering.

Will also need to work out the costs properly. Hiring the kitchen would be around £100 a day, there would be insurance, a website etc...

Maybe I started this thread a little prematurely 😂 I got excited about the idea.

I wouldn't use the puree service because these are very easy to make at home and I'd move to BLW very quickly.

The meals for toddlers are more appealing although it's not a service I'd use every week. The occasional stock up for the freezer would be good though.

I actually think a better market would be for slightly older kids though. Kids who are coming in from school/after-school clubs/childcare, but still need to be in bed in a timely manner, maybe 3-8 year olds. That's where having something really healthy and tasty that is pre-cooked and can go on the microwave would be a godsend.

This exists already, multiple places do . I don’t see why they’d be any different to a pouch / jar. Seems incredibly expensive for the toddler
meals, when most likely it won’t get eaten 🤣 my toddler just had a plate of peas for her dinner.

Interesting @NuffSaidSam , I hadn't considered this older group. I'm slightly worried about older kids being more fussy - if your 16m old rejects some meals you might keep trying, if your 6 yr old rejects them you probably wouldn't bother again?

I probably need to do some local market research, but not quite sure how to go about it aside from just asking in the school WhatsApp group...

www.luneandwild.co.uk/products/copy-of-flavour-explorers-puree-variety-box-9-months

Sounds identical to your idea potsfortots.co.uk/products/my-first-meals-bundle-8-meals

If those parents are your target audience then bear in mind that their children will be in nursery full time or else they will have a nanny, which means the vast majority of mealtimes are already accounted for.

Where I live everyone tends to do BLW which means prepared cubes of food just wouldn’t have the same market as it might in other places.

Nah we did blw so I'd just lob them a bit of what we were eating. We also have allergies in the house so we wouldn't trust an outside source for regular food.

Not sure if it's of interest to you, but I would have paid good money for allergen free taster meals for my coeliac son when he was younger.

Making a single portion of something like macaroni cheese, for example, with GF flour in the cheese sauce and GF pasta etc was such an expensive and time consuming faff when there was no guarantee he would even like it.

Having portions that would have the home cooked flavour but without the effort from me would have been really helpful when trying to broaden his horizons without bankrupting myself and wasting loads of time and food on meals that got chucked!

No idea if that would appeal more widely (eg dairy and egg free options as well) or to you, but I thought I'd share in care it's helpful!

Honestly no- I was the classic working mum but as another poster said, my kids were in nursery and had 3x meals a day covered. On non working days I wanted to cook for them. I never used puree or pouches- we were a blw family.

I’d be more likely to use something for my older kids when we’re back from activities but I couldn’t be bothered with an appointment when there are places like stocked that do a similar sort of service.

I don’t think it’s something I would have used.

However, I think it’s a local thing.

Lots of PP have mentioned this type of thing already exists, so I suppose for me the question would be if I did want such a thing, what would make me chose local?

the answer there is of course local recommendations and results. So get in local FB pages, go to local events, speak to local mums, groups, activities.

we have a mum at school who set up doing tray bakes, cakes and kids party food. She is now the go to for most events in the area. She does work out cheaper than a panic grocery shop buffet, and much nicer.
Not everyone does have time to do these things themselves, but most would prefer local, sustainable and affordable if they could.

I'm not sure anyone in that price category does purees beyond the first week anymore. Mine were eating normal meals by 8 months (in very small portions!) If you can keep costs down, you might do better supplying nurseries. Mine goes to an enormous nursery with 8 groups so they have a cook, but one group nurseries might like the idea of buying in good food, especially in a rich area with parents who would pay. It would be a more steady income stream too.

Ok it's good to hear from the mums who work full time, I work p-t and DD does 9am-3pm as DP works shorter days when I'm at work.

Maybe I drop the purées idea (although the links @Peonies12 shared do show there's a market for it...but obviously I'd just have a small local market).

I guess if I have a kitchen 1 day a week then it's better to keep things simple.

We did BLW too actually. But DD still had quite a lot of purée to dip veg into etc and has soup most days now, which she feeds herself.

Little Dish are the healthy ready meals in supermarkets, i used these about once a week for my two boys, especially for something like fish pie that I can’t eat due to allergies.

COOK do kids one portion frozen ready meals that are fairly healthy and reasonably priced.

I would prefer frozen as no waste. There is definitely a delivery service of frozen purées for weaning that I was marketed on instagram, i can’t remember the name tho.

I wouldn’t collect. There is a woman locally who does amazing sourdough, but you have to collect it once a week at a certain time and I can’t be bothered, even tho she’s only a few streets away! Others do tho so don’t take my word for it.

i have children with nut allergies, so if you used nuts
in other recipes or couldn’t guarantee that the hired kitchen was nut free I would be cautious. this is partly why I prefer bigger brands

@pteromum it's an area that has a lot of child-focused businesses already (expensive shoe and book shops, play cafes etc), people are proud to live here and support independent businesses. I'm hoping mum+local would be a good marketing angle.

Er yes actually my daughter's nursery doesn't have a kitchen @Paaseitjes 😯

I understand the allergies issue @Nightmanagerfan DD also has nut allergies. As in I understand why it would make you think twice about it.

I would start by researching the current market. There are a lot of companies providing this sort of service so get to know the potential competitors. Maybe even order and sample their product.

Then work out the demographic that may be interested in your product. It sounds like you want to serve local customers. If you live rurally this may prove a non-starter. I was a working mum and have always used prepping and cooking the evening meal as my wind down. I was also highly organised, so prepared and froze meals for a few weeks. DS was fed organically or at least locally grown and supplied produce. That would have been a must for any prepped meals. My DF was in the chemical industry and was a big fan of organically grown food surprisingly.

Then there is marketing and product package design. The sort of people who can afford pre-made meals may be very exacting on packaging materials. Again do your research.

Finally costing. You have to account for every penny of manufacturing costs including the hourly rate you want to earn. Start with your hourly rate then add manufacturing costs, delivery cost, packaging and check if your product will be VAT exempt, not all food products are deemed VAT free. Once you have a total figure you can then work out unit cost. So many people forget to add in their hourly rate when calculating unit cost, if it takes you 6 hrs to make 100 meals and you want to earn minimum wage that means you have to charge £0.76 per meal on top of total production costs. If you are only supplying 25 meals a day that will rise to £3 per meal.

In self employed business you always start with the salary you are aiming for as a baseline for pricing. I work in an industry where we have to clear £500 an hour just to open the doors so our prices are based on time taken. If I want to earn £40 an hour we cost procedures accordingly.

With the right preparation and research you may be able to identify a market for your business but it will take hard work and not necessarily in the kitchen.