Should You Use A Meal Prep Company? General Pros and Cons, and My Experience with MealKraft

Late this Fall I used a local meal prep company, MealKraft, to supplement my diet with one meal per day for 2 weeks. I did this for a few reasons:

  1. To use this experience as a talking point about the pros and cons of using a meal prep company – something many of my clients often ask about.
  2. I’m lazy.
  3. I’m a sucker for convenience.

First off, why would someone want to use a Meal Prep Company? Especially if they can just meal prep themselves? Well, I’ve already touched on 2 of my own personal reasons above: too lazy to cook, don’t have time (convenience). But another reason people meal prep, generally, is to add structure and limit the guess work for what they are going to eat that week – it’s simply easier to plan out what they are going to eat each day, for each day of the week and stick to that. It’s pretty common in my industry to hear “Sunday’s are for Meal Prep.” Truth is, I don’t do it, nor do I harp on my clients to do it. Also, I think it’s pretty boring, and un-practical long term, to have your whole week’s meals planned in advanced with little-to-no flexibility.

Instead of meal prepping, I opt to make meals in bulk whenever I’m making them and think I’ll use more servings in the next few days – for example I never make a single serving of one of my favourite crock pot dishes: 3 Ingredient Chicken.

So, having never tried a meal prep company I thought I’d team up with MealKraft to try it out and blog about my experience. Also, Sean Chai, the owner of MealKraft, hooked me up with some free food for two weeks, so it would be stupid not to at least try it out.

So, what did I think of it?

I thought it was awesome, actually. And, I’m not saying this as a plug for MealKraft, or any other Meal Prep company. As a self-employed business owner, one of the things you soon come to realize is that your time is extremely valuable. As you get busier and your business starts to grow you start to protect your time, and you try to “buy back” time whenever possible- if it makes sense from a financial point, that is.

So, what are the Pros and Cons to using a Meal Prep company? Here’s how I view them:

let’s first talk about the Pros:

Convenience.  As mentioned earlier, I’m a sucker for convenience. So for me this is a definite Pro. Someone else making my meals = muy bien (very good, in Spanish). I’m sure everyone else can relate with this.

Nutrition. With MealKraft they are made fresh each Sunday, so they are fresh; not pre-made and frozen like the Jenny Craig variety. Therefore, there are no preservatives in there that would otherwise lessen the quality of food that you are getting. This is obviously a good thing.

“Buy back” time. Making healthy meals is time-consuming. Shopping for the various ingredients, prepping the food, and then cooking it all takes time. Instead of doing all of this, or at least a lot of it, you can work instead.

For a Party of 1: More Cost & Time effective, and Increased Variety & Less Waste. I will explain this point by using one of the dishes as an example: the Oven Baked Salmon. This meal has the following ingredients: salmon, baby potatoes, and asparagus. Let’s lay out two scenarios:

  • Making a single serving. The time invested into shopping for the ingredients, prepping, and cooking would be large for just 1 serving. This a Con. Further, there are typically discounts for food when you buy more volume, eg. a bag of potatoes has a cheaper per/potato cost than when being bought individually. For a single serving, you’d only need 1-2 potatoes, so this is also a Con. Alternatively, you could maximize the variety of food you could eat in a given week, as well as limit the waste of food that would otherwise be wasted if you opted for the volume discount mentioned earlier – these are both Pros.
  • Making the Meal in Bulk: The opposite is seen. You would get increased “time investment” for each serving, and you would save money for the volume of food bought. However, you would get decreased variety as you now have to eat the same thing multiple times that week. There is also a greater likelihood for wasting food that you don’t end up using.

*The above point is true for “a party of one”, but doesn’t hold as much truth if you are cooking for a family or for multiple people.

So what about the Cons of using a Meal Prep Company?

Not Group / Family Friendly. I think this is my strongest point against using any type of Meal Prep Company, which I alluded to with the * in the above point. When you analyze all of the Pros listed above to an ever-increasing amount of people, they start becoming less beneficial. Especially In the case of a family: you aren’t instilling good habits for your kids in the future; it’s my belief that you should be “investing” the time in your kids to teach them how to shop, prep, and cook food as this is a valuable life skill.

Cost & Time effective? I put this as a question mark because ultimately whether it’s cost and time effective for you, depends on you. Using the family of 4 talked about above, this would not be the case.

Practicality. At some point you have to learn to live without using a Meal Prep service, so long-term this isn’t practical. This same logic applies to all of the different types of nutrition “programs” out there, like Isagenix for example. You can’t rely on something so heavily that you can’t exist without it. Rather, you should strategically use it, but know how to not use it – if that makes sense.

So there a some definite pros and cons to whether or not you should use a Meal Prep Company. And if you want to simply meal prep yourself, then all the power to you. However, one thing is for certain: people are lazy, and people value convenience – Im a combination of both. As such, my recommendation is that if you find value in using a Meal Prep company, then use them/it. But, it should act to supplement your diet, and be used as a tool rather than any form of permanent replacement.

If you want to try out MealKraft, check our their website and make an order if you wish. Here is a 10% discount code: overhaul2017. Disclaimer: I don’t get any form of compensation if you order using that discount code, so simply use it if you’d like.

Till next time,

-Mike

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