Marketing a meal prep business is not the same job as marketing a restaurant. A restaurant sells one decision at a time. A meal prep line sells one decision that repeats for weeks, so the money is not in winning attention. It is in winning the second week. That changes the order of the work: the offer, the price, the delivery area and the channel, before you spend anything on ads.
Most advice for food businesses starts at the end. Post more, run ads, hire a photographer. That is the last tenth of the job, and it is why kitchens spend money without changing anything. The first nine tenths is structure: who you feed, what you charge, how far you deliver, and how they hear about you. This page walks those four in order, with the trade-off at each step, because getting them wrong is what makes advertising expensive.
Why marketing for a kitchen starts with structure, not posts
Schemes are necessary because they allow us to organise our thinking and our work. We cannot do everything at once. Just as when you build a house you start with an architect, when you organise a business you need to start with a structure. Marketing is nothing more than the organisation of a business. It literally means “to reach the market”. Since the purpose of a company’s existence is to meet a market need, it includes all the activities that describe how a company should operate. A simple scheme that suits me and allows me to better organise my thinking is the 4Ps:
What you actually sell, and why it decides the rest
- Menu: The set of meals and plans offered by a meal prep operation. May include different cuisines, special dishes, desserts, and drinks.
- Appearance and presentation: how the food is presented to the customer, the aesthetics of the containers, the way it is packed and delivered.
- Variety: the range and variety of options available, such as meat dishes, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free.
- Additional services: additional options such as catering, delivery, online reservations, special culinary events.
How to price a meal prep line
- Pricing strategy: The way products and services are priced, e.g. premium, mid-range, low-end pricing strategy.
- Price promotions: Temporary price reductions, special offers, happy hours, promotional sets.
- Discount coupons and rebates: Coupons, loyalty cards, seasonal or occasional discounts.
- Price elasticity: How prices can change depending on the time of day, day of the week, season or demand.
Delivery area and distribution: where the model breaks
- Location: The location of the kitchen, its accessibility and the delivery area it can reach.
- Channels of distribution: The different ways in which products are delivered to customers, such as eat-in, take-out, home delivery.
- Logistics: The process of managing deliveries, storage of ingredients, delivery time to the customer.
- Availability: Opening hours, number of seats available, ability to book tables.
Which channels are worth a kitchen’s money
- Advertising: Advertising campaigns in traditional media (TV, radio, press) and digital media (social media, Google Ads).
- Public Relations: Building a positive image through media relations, participation in local events, sponsorship.
- Direct marketing: Direct communication with customers, e.g. newsletters, SMS, emails.
- Sales promotions: Hold special events, competitions, tastings, give away samples.
- Feedback and reviews: Managing and utilising customer reviews on review platforms, social media.
On the internet, in books or in conversations with friends, you’ve probably come across various truths that have some truth to them, but don’t quite reflect reality:
- Product – cooking is an art, it is the chef’s touch that counts.
- Price – if you want to increase sales, you have to reduce prices.
- Place – location is everything.
- Promotion – a good product will defend itself.
And here is how I see each of these elements and why I disagree with these myths:
The product is an answer to a need. The need is not: “to eat something”. A need can be:
- Try new flavours – casual dining,
- Impress your partner on a date – fine dining,
- Spend time in a pleasant atmosphere – cafes,
- Satisfy hunger quickly – kebabs, fast food, staff canteen,
- Nourish the body – healthy food, prepaid meal plans.
Therefore, the product must be repeatable. When I think of McDonalds, I know I will get the same burger, coke and fries every time. When I think of fast food, I know exactly what kind of experience I will get. Humans hate unpredictability. Does that mean the menu should not change? Not at all, McDonald’s also has fixed and seasonal offers. A limited-time sandwich that sells out fast can become so popular it turns into a synonym for something iconic, unusual and expected. My advice: don’t overestimate the quality of the food. I have learnt in diet catering that what seems absolutely phenomenal to me is not so to customers. What’s more, there are plenty of companies whose food seems average or even inedible, and their sales are growing.
Price – “expensive” means giving little value for the price we have to pay. This is important – the value we, the consumer, perceive, not the seller. I may not want to pay for organic vegetables if they taste exactly the same. On the other hand, people who don’t want to consume zoonotic products pay extra for plant-based coffee drinks or meat alternatives, and no one seems to make a problem of it. Is $2,500 a lot or not? It depends what it’s for. For shoes? A lot. For a square metre of an apartment in a major city centre? Not a lot. For a square metre of an apartment in a small town? A lot.
Stanley thermos flasks cost 50-100% more than regular ones and are a hit on social media. Why is that? Their perceived usefulness is much higher than that of competing products.
iPhones are the most expensive in the world and also the best-selling in the world.
For this reason, customers will be more willing to pay more for “an evening of authentic Uruguayan sushi by Master Keryoshi accompanied by Bengali rumba dancers and a tasting of Honduran shaman’s brew” – a unique product – than for “just sushi” – an easily comparable product of which there are dozens, if not hundreds.
Places. It’s probably not the best idea to open a fine dining restaurant in a tunnel under a railway station, but location is not counterintuitive. Matching distribution to location is. We have 4 basic distribution models:
- Dine-in restaurant
- Food to go
- Instant Delivery – delivery via marketplace
- Planned Delivery – event catering or prepaid meal plans (diet catering)
The distribution method forces the scalability of the restaurant concept. By scalability, I mean the number of customers that can be served in relation to fixed costs, including the size of the premises.
- The least scalable is a non takeaway and delivery type restaurant (such as fine dining), where we are directly limited by the amount of space in the premises.
- In second place is instant delivery. The limitation is the capacity of the courier and how many customers they can handle in an hour.
- Thirdly, we have take-away, such as a bakery or patisserie, where customers come to buy baked goods. They can serve dozens of customers per hour in a relatively small space.
- The most scalable will be event caterers and meal prep operators. The former are able to cater events for thousands of people, while the latter cook thousands, tens of thousands and the largest even hundreds of thousands of meals a day and distribute them across a whole country every day.
Promotion. It won’t do anything by itself, and it certainly won’t promote the product. The winner will always be the company that is able to pay more to acquire a customer, that is, the one that most likely has a higher margin. You can read about margin in foodservice here. The customer should hear about your brand often and a lot. There are infinitely more people who will never know about your brand, despite your sincerest efforts, than those who will be offended by the amount of content you produce. Don’t worry about the offended, they’re not your customers anyway. Take this drink as an example. Brown sugar water with cocaine in the name – does that sound like a recipe for a brilliant product? How much can you say about such a product? Coca-Cola is doing quite well, and has been talking about the product for more than 100 years. The key is that it advertises constantly at an intensity greater than anyone else and longer than any of us reading this article.
Needs are created. None of us needs sweetened brown water (or the light version with aspartame), coffee for the price of lunch, or pale rolls with something like meat inside. Pepsi Cola, Starbucks and McDonalds are global brands worth billions of dollars. The key is intensity and repetition.
Another myth is that you have to “be everywhere.” As long as you don’t have very large budgets, you simply can’t afford it. Any form of promotion will initially be ineffective until you learn how to use it properly. Learning TikTok, Instagram, print advertising, influencer partnerships and Google Ads at the same time is a recipe for disaster. You don’t need multiple channels. My team and I grew one of my meal prep brands to $203,956 in revenue in a single month, 4 months from launch, using only ads on TikTok, then adding Facebook. We didn’t have influencers, we didn’t throw in organic posts, we didn’t do ads on Google – exclusively one communication channel at first, where we tested all the time what we could do better.
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Partner channels deserve their own playbook: meal prep B2B channels.
Where to go next
This is one piece of a bigger move: adding a prepaid meal-plan line to the kitchen you already run. When you are ready to land your first paying subscribers, The Prepaid Meal-Prep Playbook is the step-by-step playbook.
