Meal Prep for Busy Families: Is It Actually Worth It?

There is a very specific time of day in a busy household when everything starts to unravel.

Usually somewhere around 5:30pm.

Someone needs to be picked up.

Someone else needs to be dropped off.

There's homework.

There's sport.

There's an email you forgot to answer.

The dog has apparently never been fed in its life.

And somebody asks:

“What's for dinner?”

Excellent question.

This is one of the main reasons families use us.

Not because they can't cook.

Because dinner happens every single night, regardless of whether anyone has the time or energy for it.

Busy family meal prep isn't really about being organised

People often assume families who meal prep must be spectacularly organised.

Meal plan on Sunday.

Shop Monday.

Batch cook Tuesday.

Colour-coded freezer labels by Wednesday.

Good for them.

For everyone else, meal prep can simply mean getting enough food cooked at once that you don't have to think about dinner every night.

That's really the goal.

Not becoming better at domestic administration.

Just making weekdays easier.

The worst time to decide what's for dinner is at dinner time

This is where things usually go wrong.

When everyone is hungry and tired, nobody wants to make another decision.

You might technically have enough food in the house to cook dinner.

But turning those ingredients into something edible still requires effort.

That's when takeaway starts looking extremely attractive.

Having prepared meals in the fridge changes the question from:

“What on earth are we going to make?”

to:

“Curry or pasta?”

Much easier.

It can dramatically reduce takeaway-by-exhaustion

There is absolutely nothing wrong with takeaway.

Takeaway because you want takeaway is lovely.

Takeaway because you've stood in front of the fridge for eight minutes and lost the will to live is different.

Busy families often don't realise how much they are spending on emergency food until they add it up.

One takeaway dinner.

A quick drive-through after sport.

Buying lunch because there weren't leftovers.

Another supermarket stop because there is nothing for tomorrow.

It all adds up.

Having several meals already prepared doesn't mean you'll never order food again.

It just means it becomes a choice rather than the emergency plan.

A Full Cook can take care of a surprising amount of food

Our Full Cook is generally five dishes, with around five adult serves of each.

That's roughly 25 serves.

How long that lasts depends entirely on the household.

A family of five might use a whole dish for dinner.

A smaller family may have leftovers for lunches.

Some meals might go straight into the freezer for the following week.

You can also add sides or extra dishes depending on the booking.

The point isn't necessarily to cook every single thing your family will eat for the next seven days.

It's to remove enough cooking that the week suddenly feels much more manageable.

You can choose food your family actually eats

This is a big one for families.

Meal prep is only useful if people eat it.

There is no medal for creating an incredibly nutritious freezer full of meals that your children regard with suspicion.

You know your household.

If everyone loves spaghetti bolognese, put it on the menu.

If curry always disappears, cook curry.

If introducing five new recipes in the same week would cause a small family uprising, perhaps don't do that.

A really good first cook is usually a mixture of familiar favourites and maybe one or two things you'd like to try.

You can get adventurous later.

Different schedules don't have to mean different dinners

Modern families don't necessarily sit down at 6pm and eat together every night.

Someone might have football.

Someone gets home from work late.

Someone eats before training.

Someone else won't be home until 8pm.

Prepared meals work well because people can eat when they need to.

Meals can be kept in family-sized portions or divided into smaller serves depending on how the household operates.

You're not trying to force the family into the meal plan.

The meal plan needs to work around the family.

It can save your weekends too

A lot of people already batch cook.

The problem is that their weekend disappears into it.

Saturday morning becomes groceries.

Sunday afternoon becomes chopping, cooking and cleaning.

Suddenly it's Monday again and your exciting weekend activity was grating cheese for six meals.

If you love batch cooking, great.

But if you don't, those are several hours you could be doing something else.

In-home cooking doesn't just save time on weeknights.

It can give you that batch-cooking time back as well.

What about fussy eaters?

Almost every family thinks theirs are uniquely difficult.

They're not. 😂

One child doesn't like sauce.

Another won't eat vegetables if they can identify them.

Someone has suddenly stopped eating a meal they've loved for four years.

Welcome.

The good thing about cooking specifically for one household is that the menu can reflect what people actually eat.

That doesn't mean we're running a restaurant and cooking six separate dinners, though you can have up to 6 different meals to choose from.

But it does mean we can choose meals carefully, leave certain ingredients out where appropriate and portion food in a way that works better for the family.

It's also useful during the really busy seasons

Sometimes family life is manageable.

Then sport starts.

Or work gets ridiculous.

Or school holidays happen.

Or someone is studying for exams.

Or you've had a baby.

Or one parent is travelling.

Or everyone gets sick one after another for approximately six weeks.

Meal prep doesn't need to be a permanent lifestyle decision.

Sometimes outsourcing the cooking during the busiest part of the year is enough.

You can use help when you need it.

Is in-home meal prep worth the money for a family?

It depends on what problem you're trying to solve.

If your main goal is spending the absolute minimum possible on food, cooking everything yourself will generally be cheaper.

If the problem is that you don't have enough hours in the week, then the calculation changes.

You're paying someone else to take care of several hours of planning, preparation, cooking and cleaning.

You're also potentially reducing takeaway, food waste and those constant little supermarket trips that somehow lately, cost $47 even though you only went in for milk.

For many families, the value isn't just in the food.

It's in not having to deal with dinner every night.

Dinner doesn't have to be a daily project

This is probably the biggest shift.

We tend to think of dinner as something that needs to be created every evening.

It doesn't.

It just needs to exist when everyone is hungry.

You can absolutely cook it yourself.

You can order it.

You can batch cook it on Sunday.

Or you can have somebody come into your house every week or fortnight and fill the fridge for you.

There's no prize for choosing the hardest option.

And sometimes the best family meal plan is simply the one that means nobody needs to ask what's for dinner.

If your week could do with fewer 5.30pm crises, you can request a quote.