I Can Cook. I Just Don't Want To: Why More Australians Are Outsourcing Dinner

Somewhere along the way, we decided that outsourcing house cleaning was perfectly normal.

Nobody raises an eyebrow if you pay someone to mow the lawn.

People outsource ironing, dog walking, bookkeeping, gardening, car washing and approximately 400 other jobs they could technically do themselves.

But mention paying someone to cook your meals and suddenly it sounds wildly extravagant.

We disagree.

A lot of our clients can cook.

Some of them are actually very good cooks.

They just don't want to spend several hours every week planning meals, shopping, chopping, cooking and cleaning up afterwards.

Fair enough, really.

“But I know how to cook”

So do most people who use us.

That's not usually the problem.

The problem is that cooking dinner is never just cooking dinner.

First, you have to decide what everyone is eating.

Then you have to check what's already in the house.

Then you need groceries.

Then something needs defrosting.

Then somebody announces they don't like the thing they happily ate last week.

Then it's 6:20pm and nobody has actually started cooking.

This is generally when takeaway begins looking like a very sensible business decision.

The problem is often not cooking. It's thinking about food all the time.

This is the bit people underestimate.

Feeding a household takes up a ridiculous amount of mental space.

What are we having tonight?

What do we need from the shops?

Do we still have chicken?

When does that mince expire?

Who ate the leftovers?

Did anyone take something out of the freezer?

Can somebody please tell me why there are three open jars of salsa?

It never really stops.

And for plenty of households, that constant food admin is more annoying than the cooking itself.

Having a fridge or freezer full of ready-to-go meals takes a lot of those decisions away.

Time is expensive too

People tend to compare the cost of meal prep with the cost of groceries and stop there.

But groceries are only one part of feeding yourself.

There's also the time spent:

• planning meals
• making shopping lists
• buying the groceries
• unpacking them
• prepping ingredients
• cooking
• portioning
• cleaning up
• and then doing it all again a few days later.

If you genuinely enjoy that process, lovely.

Keep doing it.

You are probably not the target audience for a business called I Hate Cooking. 😂

But if you'd rather spend that time with your family, working, exercising, sleeping, staring at a wall in complete silence or doing literally anything else, outsourcing it starts to make a lot more sense.

It's not the same as meal delivery

This is an important difference.

We're not sending you a box of pre-made meals from a commercial kitchen, or a 628 litre stock pot in a factory.

We come to your house and cook your food in your kitchen.

You choose the meals.

The groceries are yours.

The portions can suit your household.

If there are ingredients you hate, they don't have to be in there.

If you prefer bigger family portions, that's fine.

If you want individual serves for the freezer, also fine.

It's still your food.

Someone else is just doing the work.

You can still eat like you

This is one of the biggest reasons people prefer in-home meal prep over buying ready meals.

You don't have to choose from a fixed weekly menu.

You don't have to accept a sauce you don't like because it happens to come with the dish.

You don't have to buy six meals that all somehow contain capsicum.

You can choose the sort of food your household actually eats.

That might be curries, pasta, soups, casseroles, Mexican, family favourites or a freezer full of very sensible meals nobody needs to negotiate over.

The goal isn't to make your food exciting enough for Instagram.

The goal is to make sure you have food you actually want to eat.

It can also stop the takeaway spiral

Most people don't order takeaway because they have carefully analysed their food budget and decided delivery fees are an excellent investment.

They order it because they're tired.

There's nothing ready.

Nobody can agree on dinner.

And cooking feels like one job too many.

Once there are meals sitting in the fridge, the equation changes.

You can still order pizza because you want pizza.

You're just less likely to order it because the alternative is making a meal from scratch at the end of a very long day.

There's a difference.

Sometimes outsourcing dinner is temporary

Not everyone uses an in-home cook forever.

Sometimes life is just a bit much for a while.

People use us while recovering from surgery or injury.

During particularly busy work periods.

After having a baby, or before if mum is on bed rest. 

While caring for someone else.

When their usual routines have gone completely sideways.

There is no rule that says you need to be permanently overwhelmed before you're allowed to ask for help.

Sometimes getting food sorted for a few weeks is enough to make everything else feel manageable again.

And sometimes people just hate cooking

This is also allowed.

You don't need a dramatic reason.

You don't need to be exhausted, injured, busy, neurodivergent or responsible for seventeen children.

You can simply not enjoy cooking.

Plenty of people don't.

That is, in fact, how we ended up with the name.

We built an entire business around the idea that maybe people shouldn't have to spend their spare time doing something they thoroughly dislike just because everybody needs dinner.

Outsourcing doesn't mean losing control

This is another thing people sometimes worry about.

If somebody else is cooking, will you end up eating whatever they decide to make?

No.

The whole point is that you choose.

You choose the dishes.

You choose the ingredients.

You choose how the meals are portioned.

You choose whether you want us to do the shopping or whether you'd rather organise it yourself.

We take over the work.

Not your kitchen.

It's really just another household service

That's probably the simplest way to think about it.

If you hire a cleaner, you're not admitting defeat at vacuuming.

If you pay someone to mow your lawn, nobody assumes you've forgotten how grass works.

You've just decided that task isn't where you want to spend your time.

In-home cooking is the same idea.

We come in.

We cook.

We portion the meals.

We clean up afterwards.

And you get on with the rest of your life.

So, is outsourcing dinner worth it?

For some people, absolutely.

For others, probably not.

If you love meal planning, enjoy cooking and find a Sunday batch-cook deeply relaxing, keep doing exactly that.

But if dinner is one of those jobs that seems to arrive every single day with absolutely no respect for your schedule, it might be worth looking at differently.

You don't have to be bad at cooking to outsource it. And you don't have to have ur food every day. Eat out once a week, or cook when you feel like it. We are your back-up! We've got you!

You don't even need a particularly good excuse.

You can cook.

You just don't want to.

We get it.

It's literally our business.

You can cook. If you'd rather not, you can request a quote.