Food Preparation Business Plan

What’s For Dinner? is an exciting, new business with a unique approach to helping people enjoy home cooked meals with their families. Customers will come to our Plano, TX location and prepare 12 meals that they pre-select from a menu in a party atmosphere. In two hours, they will have a month’s worth of meals to put in their freezer.

By focusing on our competitive edge (no direct competitors in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area), our customers, and their needs, What’s For Dinner? will increase sales to a point that exceeds $1.3M in three years.

What’s For Dinner? is owned jointly by Alan and Kim Kirby as an S Corporation. Alan and Kim have 15 years of experience in the food service and entertainment industries, as a party planner and personal chef, respectively. They know the kinds of food preparation available in the Collin County area. With two teenaged children, have experienced the frustration of trying to feed a whole family healthy food both cheaply and quickly. Alan’s existing contacts with local social and community groups, and Kim’s ongoing relationships with food distributors, specialty grocers, and high-end clients will all help to generate high sales from early in the first year.

What’s For Dinner offers several advantages to its target market:

• Relatively inexpensive meal preparation: ~$15 for a four-person meal.
• Fun, social, party atmosphere.
• Convenient: eat your prepared meals in your home, when you want.
• Saves time: no shopping, no prep, no clean up.
• For seniors, special menus and transportation assistance make meals easy.
• And, best of all, not having to decide “What’s For Dinner?”

The purpose of this plan is two-fold. The first is to acquire funding of $259,708. The second is to lay the foundations of the company’s vision, philosophy, and strategy, to ensure that we know where we are going and how to get there.

1.1 Mission

What’s For Dinner? is a specialized business that provides a variety of people with the opportunity to prepare health conscious, yet savory meals that can be frozen to take home and eat at a later time.  The purpose of this process is to both optimize the time investment needed to prepare the quality of meals that What’s For Dinner? will become known for, within the clients’ current schedules, and also for them to practice the proper health conscious behavior that has become the target lifestyle of a health deficient society.

What’s For Dinner? will provide a unique and distinctive service that will unite a party-like atmosphere with professional food preparation that will attract a growing repeat customer base.  What’s For Dinner? will allow families and busy professionals the ability to prepare a variety of meals quickly in a fun atmosphere, away from home, thus giving people more of what they are looking for – time.

Our goal is to be a self-sustaining corporate enterprise within 3 years from the company’s inception to begin expanding our menu offerings within 3 months and its location offerings within 4 years.  What’s For Dinner? will employ 4 individuals full time within 3 years, and will hit net profit goals of $100,000 by the end of its second year of existence.

In short, we will be in the business of helping our customers to relieve their daily stresses of what to fix their families for dinner by providing them with a great menu choice of meals that they will prepare.

1.2 Keys to Success

The keys to success in this business are:

• Creating a high level of customer satisfaction in our service and products, which will lead to customer retention each month. 
• Marketing: getting our name out to the public, primarily through an intensive marketing campaign driven by our customers (word of mouth) with a supplemental vehicle of standardized and conventional marketing tactics. 
• Great product quality and variety that will be used to aid in customer retention and growth. 
• Finances: as our customer base increases we will be better able to lower our supply costs by buying more in bulk through food service distributors.
• Variety of menus offered based on seasons, trends and customer preferences.
• Exceeding our customers’ expectations by offering them a higher quality of food for a competitive price.
• What’s For Dinner’s website will be an efficient and convenient place for customers to register and pay for parties.

1.3 Objectives

The objectives for What’s For Dinner? in the first three years of operation include:

1. To exceed customers’ expectations for food service and food service products.
2. To increase the number of clients served by 25% per year through superior service.
3. To develop a sustainable start-up business that is profitable.
4. To achieve an after tax net profit of $134K by year three.
5. To achieve a net income of more than 10% of sales by the third year.