The Impossible Becomes Reality
"Paweł, Paweł, come quickly, you have to see this!" – my Aga called out to me with a tone that mixed disbelief and fear.
"What happened? I'm kind of busy," I replied, thinking it was just another internet drama, something like: "a politician said something compromising or outrageous" – just another day in the world.
She showed me her phone with a news article.
"Paweł, the whole world is being locked down. There's some epidemic that came to us from Wuhan, China."
We’d already had other epidemics before: bird flu, mad cow disease, swine flu, and others. My first thought was that it was just another media-driven topic. Surely, there was no way they could lock the entire world at home, right?
The information had been circulating earlier, but at a much lower intensity. We don't watch TV. At the time, we were on a family trip to Gdańsk, relaxing and working by the sea. Most global news had flown under our radar until it began to affect us directly. Suddenly, news of the epidemic was everywhere: our Facebook feeds, Instagram, email inboxes. The world froze.
The government announced the introduction of a state of epidemic threat:
“We are implementing safety measures in connection with the coronavirus, including restrictions on movement. However, the obligation to stay at home will not apply to commuting to work or taking care of essential daily needs such as buying food, medicine, or caring for loved ones. We want Poles to avoid putting themselves and others at risk of coronavirus infection.”
We stared at each other in silence, reading more articles and comments in disbelief. When it finally sank in that this was real and already decided, I didn’t feel a fear of suddenly getting sick. I had read that those most at risk were people with weakened immune systems, mainly the elderly and those with obesity.
Thoughts began to sprout in my mind:
“How will work look now?”
“How will kids go to school?”
“Will there be any problems with food availability?”
The Only Constant Is Change
Closed restaurants, shops letting in one person at a time, and massive queues outside. The situation escalated day by day.
Business and startups are my interests, so I was curious to see how the market would respond to these events. The quick commerce category exploded—food delivery in 10 minutes became the new trend.
In Europe, Gorillas led the way, becoming the fastest company in history to achieve unicorn status, valued at $1 billion just 9 months after its founding.
Restaurants that didn’t go bankrupt and were fighting to survive turned to marketplaces to enable deliveries to their customers. However, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Marketplace commissions, reaching up to 30%, effectively wiped out any margin for restaurants. It became clear that customers using these apps stayed loyal to the marketplaces, not the restaurants. Attempts to encourage direct orders bypassing intermediaries largely failed.
Millions of hospitality workers lost their jobs. A significant portion switched industries, for example, becoming couriers, as demand for them surged due to the rapid growth of e-commerce. Once restrictions were lifted, the food service industry faced a severe challenge: a lack of skilled staff, many of whom had found work in other sectors.
Because supply (chefs seeking jobs) was smaller than demand (restaurants looking for chefs after reopening), wages rose dramatically, in some cases doubling within 2–3 years.
Geopolitical events, like the war between Russia and Ukraine, drove up fuel and energy prices, significantly affecting food truck businesses and food startups. This, in turn, caused logistics costs—and consequently food prices—to skyrocket. Restaurant prices, both for dine-in and delivery, rose to a level that made eating out unaffordable for much of the population, influencing many to seek affordable meal prep options or start a catering business that offers value. While weekends still saw people visiting restaurants, weekday traffic and orders dropped, as wages failed to keep up with inflation.
The world was changing before our eyes. Alongside growing challenges, new needs emerged. Everyone realized how precious health is. Who among us doesn’t know at least one person saying they need to take better care of themselves, whether through exercise or healthier eating? Around 70% of people say they’d like to eat healthier, which is a significant opportunity for starting a health-focused food business in 2025. At the same time, the number of people with dietary restrictions increased significantly. The most common are avoiding meat or all animal products, but there’s also a growing demand for foods tailored to religious needs, like halal, or fitness goals, like high-protein meals.
Designing a menu tailored to individual needs is an art—like building a LEGO set with a million pieces, many of which are damaged or don’t fit. This is particularly important when considering how to start a meal prep service that meets diverse dietary needs. There are more food products available now than ever, but finding, selecting, calculating, and cooking the right ones is no small feat. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack—there are endless options, but very few match our needs and lifestyle. Without enough time and knowledge, creating a proper daily menu feels almost impossible.
We dream of a beautiful treehouse, but amidst the chaos of life, it often ends up as a mess, leaving us feeling far from satisfied.
Switching to remote work disrupted the monotony of our daily routine—the grind of spending an hour commuting to work, 8 hours at a desk, another hour traveling to the store, an hour shopping, an hour cooking, an hour cleaning, and then off to bed, only to repeat it all again.
It turned out that for many, remote work was far more convenient, and commuting to the office wasn’t as necessary as we once believed. Similar changes occurred in our approach to shopping and eating—we suddenly realized: “Someone else can do this for me, and I gain time for the things I enjoy.”
The Aftermath: Four Key Trends Reshaping How We Eat and Impacting Food Business Ideas in 2025
Health
Yoga studios, CrossFit boxes, and gyms are sprouting up like mushrooms after the rain. Marathons have become a staple of urban life, and sales of supplements are breaking records. Moreover, 70% of people actively seek healthier food options. Eating is no longer just about taste—it’s now a way of taking care of both body and mind.
Convenience
We live in the age of subscriptions—from Netflix and Spotify to gyms and phones. It’s all about the "set it and forget it" mentality. Why? Because it’s convenient. We want to minimize effort, and convenience now dominates our culinary choices as well, pushing the growth of food startups focusing on ready-made meals and meal prep services. We don’t want to plan meals or cook when we can have ready-made solutions delivered right to our door.
Transparency
It’s not just about how food is produced—whether it’s ethical, sustainable, or where it comes from. While we claim these issues matter, companies like Shein, notorious for breaking every standard, continue to thrive. In food, transparency has become more personal: What exactly is in this product? Does it contain sugar? How much protein does it have? Is it vegan? Consumers demand clear, specific information to make informed decisions, which is crucial for anyone starting a food business that aims for transparency.
Time-Saving
Fast. As fast as possible. We live at the speed of immediacy. Smartphones are with us 24/7, and platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have taught us that everything needs to be "here and now." If I can’t order something with two clicks, I just scroll on. Why drive to the store, sit in traffic, or battle crowds when a courier can do it for me? This need to save time fuels the growth of delivery apps and platforms, presenting an opportunity for starting a food business focused on quick, convenient delivery.
More than half of us changed our eating habits after the COVID pandemic, but only one in three people is satisfied with the offerings in restaurants and stores. Most of us feel misled about the composition and contents of products, clearly indicating a need for transparency and clear product labeling: source.
Is It Possible to Tame the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
At this point, it was clear to me that the modern food business is not tailored to the needs of our times. I analyzed all the business models available in the market. Each of them fulfilled at most two out of the four expectations.
Food delivery isn’t as fast as it might seem. Apps are designed to showcase restaurants, not dishes. Who’s interested in restaurants? Show me the menu and don’t make me sift through a Yellow Pages of businesses! From the moment you place an order, delivery can take up to two hours, and the food arrives barely warm. You know what? I order food because I’m hungry now, not in two hours!
Is it better at a restaurant? My wife can’t eat dairy. Ordering is a real nightmare. Good luck finding out which dishes don’t contain dairy. Waiting times and prices make it more of a weekend pleasure than a daily solution.
Other models have emerged too, such as meal kits popularized by companies like HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and others. These are fantastic for people who have time and enjoy cooking. You can order one for the weekend and spend time cooking with family and friends. However, for people aged 20-40 focused on their careers, this solution is entirely unsuitable. They’re simply not home and don’t have time to cook during the week.
Then there’s the meal prep category, which is essentially the same as buying ready-made meals in the supermarket, except they’re delivered to your home. Meals arrive once a week. Are they still fresh and healthy after a week? Let’s answer that question ourselves, especially since some companies deliver frozen meals. How is this convenient? Are you going to bring a carton of frozen dinners to work? And what about breakfasts or something for the evening? There’s nothing. One way or another, you still have to go to the store. So why not just buy ready-made meals there in the first place?
Then it hit me. What we need is not mass production but mass personalization! Mass production allows for creating meals at a price affordable to the average person, while personalization ensures that the diverse needs of each of us are met.
While you’re fighting to survive, they’re taking 30% of every sale, and you don’t even have access to your customers’ email addresses or phone numbers to contact them directly.
Let’s pause here for a moment. What needs? Food is just food, right? I was hungry, now I’m full—mission accomplished. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Each of us has specific needs and expectations when it comes to eating.
Some people look to food to improve their physique, whether to lose weight or gain muscle. Others, for religious or ideological reasons, exclude certain products, like meat, pork, or require that meat be produced in a particular way—halal, for example. Then there are those with allergies, like nuts, or conditions like celiac disease, which make them unable to eat gluten. More and more people are noticing lactose intolerance. We avoid bloating products like onions, garlic, or brussels sprouts.
Running a diet catering service taught me that a significant portion of clients detest olives—it’s the most common exclusion in primate.diet, though I have no idea why. If any olive-haters could explain this in the comments, I’d be grateful.
On top of all that, we all want to eat deliciously without overspending. Add to this the need for variety; sometimes we want something portable, like a smoothie, while on cold days we crave a warm soup. Factor in calorie counting, the wide-ranging needs of our families, leftovers in the fridge, and the eternal question: “What should we have for dinner?”
Diet Catering – the Holy Grail of Gastronomy
The perfect solution would be hiring a personal chef to cook exactly what we want for the entire day, in the exact portions we need, without the dreadful ingredients we want to avoid (begone! cried olive haters in unison). However, having a dedicated person shopping and cooking for just one client is far from economical—most people simply can’t afford it.
But what if a single chef could cook for 10, 100, or even 1,000 pre-planned customers? Since the chef knows in advance what to prepare, they can plan production efficiently and do everything once instead of dozens of times throughout the day, as is typical in a restaurant.
It takes the same amount of time for a chef to put one chicken breast in the oven as it does to cook an entire tray of 100 breasts. The same applies to soup: making a pot for one person or a massive pot for hundreds takes nearly the same effort. What’s more, cooking in such large quantities allows for the use of kitchen machines that simplify and speed up the process. Peeling three potatoes with a machine? Not worth it. Peeling 300 kg of potatoes? Absolutely!
With daily meal kit deliveries, traffic jams can be avoided, and it’s much cheaper than UberEats couriers delivering single dishes. First, planned deliveries for diet catering are made outside peak hours. Second, refrigerated trucks can deliver all the packages at once.
Imagine a service where fresh meal sets are delivered daily or every other day, consisting of 3 to 5 meals per day. These sets are balanced in terms of macronutrients, calories, and allergens, so you receive your perfectly tailored Rubik’s Cube of meals. Thanks to economies of scale and far more efficient production, companies can often offer such sets, including delivery, for the price of a single dish at a high-end restaurant.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell: The client orders online—via a website or mobile app. Every day, they receive a personalized meal set that helps them effortlessly achieve their goals. The subscription model ensures they don’t have to think about anything. The business owner gains a base of loyal customers ordering five meals every day. Without geographical restrictions, the business can reach a significantly larger audience, and simpler, more cost-effective production allows for higher profit margins.
Sounds impossible? Welcome to diet catering.
The client's perspective:
Legend for the Client Table
Do I need to shop?
Indicates whether grocery shopping is necessary to supplement the delivered food.
Values: Yes, No.
Cost
How expensive the given model is from the client’s perspective.
Values: Cheap (affordable), Medium (mid-price range), Expensive (high cost).
Waiting time
How quickly the food is ready to eat.
Values: 5–10 min (Ready), 30–60 min, 60–120 min.
Health customization
How much the food supports health goals.
Values: Low (Taste most important), Medium (Balanced), High (Healthy).
Can I order online?
Availability of online ordering.
Values: No, Via marketplace, Direct.
Is the food fresh?
Freshness of the delivered food.
Values: Fresh, Chilled, Frozen.
Do I need to cook?
Indicates whether meal preparation is required.
Values: Yes, No.
Ingredient transparency
How much information about ingredients and nutritional values is provided.
Values: Ingredients only, Ingredients and allergens, Full transparency.
Supports dietary goals
Indicates whether the service supports specific dietary needs.
Values: No, Partially, Yes.
Effort with cleaning/dishes
Effort required after eating (e.g., washing dishes).
Values: None, Minimal, Yes.
Effort in meal planning
Effort needed to decide what to eat.
Values: None, Minimal, Moderate, High.
The business owner's perspective:
Legend for the Business Owner Table
Interior project cost
Reflects the investment required to create a suitable interior or space for meal preparation.
Values:
Low: Minimal or no investment (e.g., delivery services).
Medium: Requires basic preparation (e.g., food trucks).
High: Significant investment in atmosphere and customer experience (e.g., dine-in restaurants).
Property cost
Represents costs related to securing a space for business operations.
Values:
Low: Operates from inexpensive locations, such as warehouses.
Medium: Requires mobile permits or mid-range locations.
High: Requires premium locations (e.g., city centers with high foot traffic).
Service range
Defines the geographical area the business can effectively serve.
Values:
Local: Limited to the immediate surroundings.
Neighborhood-level: Covers a specific area of the city.
Regional/National: Scalable to larger areas, potentially across cities or regions.
Profitability (profit margin)
Reflects the percentage of revenue that translates into profit after covering costs.
Values:
5–15%: Low to moderate margins (e.g., restaurants).
10–20%: Moderate margins (e.g., food trucks, delivery).
15–30%: High margins (e.g., meal kits, diet catering).
Equipment cost
Includes expenses for purchasing or renting necessary tools for preparing and delivering meals.
Values:
Low: Minimal equipment requirements (e.g., meal prep).
Medium: Requires functional but portable equipment (e.g., food trucks).
High: Fully equipped kitchens for large-scale production (e.g., large-scale diet catering).
Payment timing
Indicates when customers make payments for the service or product.
Values:
After service: Payment is made after using the service (e.g., restaurants, fast food).
Upfront: Payment is made in advance (e.g., subscriptions, online orders).
Feedback collection mechanism
Evaluates the effectiveness of collecting customer feedback.
Values:
Low: General reviews without detailed information about dishes.
Medium: Feedback collected via delivery platforms.
High: Direct and frequent feedback from customers about specific meals or experiences.
Orders per customer annually
The average number of orders placed by a single customer in a year.
Values:
Varies depending on the business model (e.g., 5–10 orders annually for fast food, 25–40 orders annually for diet catering).
Average order value
Represents the typical amount spent by a customer on a single order.
Values:
Depends on the business model (e.g., $5–$15 for fast food, $20–$60 per set for diet catering).
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Calculates the total revenue generated by a customer over their relationship with the company.Values:
LTV = Annual orders × Average order value (e.g., $25–$150 for fast food, $500–$2,400 for diet catering).
Direct customer contact
Describes the level of interaction with customers.
Values:
Low: Limited or no direct contact (e.g., dine-in restaurants).
Medium: Partial interaction through platforms (e.g., delivery platforms).
High: Direct contact with the customer (e.g., diet catering).
Winners Rising from the Ashes of the Fallen
The market has exposed and verified the weaknesses of less effective business models. The failures were nothing short of spectacular:
Freshly: Acquired for $1 billion by Nestlé, only to shut down due to unprofitability. No matter how big the scale—this model simply doesn’t work. Source
Gorillas: Initially grew at a breakneck pace, but was acquired by Turkey-based Getir, and both eventually disappeared from the market. Getir now operates only in Turkey. Source
Chef’d: Once valued at $150 million, now completely gone. Source
Munchery: Operated in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York but suddenly declared bankruptcy due to insurmountable debt. Source
Plated: Acquired by grocery chain Albertsons, then shut down. Stakeholders decided they could sell ready meals directly in stores instead. Source
Blue Apron: Year after year, reports losses. They are now exploring options for selling the company or merging to survive. Source
In the diet catering sector, however, the situation is completely different.
The number of companies achieving impressive revenues in this market is growing. NTFY, Maczfit, and Kuchnia Wikinga are just a few businesses surpassing $50,000,000 in annual sales (estimated data).
Their marketing rivals that of giants: hiring celebrities, sponsoring marathons, or in the case of Kuchnia Wikinga, even sponsoring the national football team.
Despite starting much later and without such financial backing, I managed to create a diet catering brand that reached $200,000 in monthly revenue by its fourth month of operation.
If you also want to start your own food business, make sure to watch the free online training.
Why Were We Deceived? For Money.
We’ve been made to believe that healthy eating is complicated. There’s an endless stream of new trends: low-fat, low-carb, keto, paleo, intermittent fasting. It seems that to run a healthy food business, you must serve only goji berries in coconut milk sprinkled with acai. The common belief is that healthy food is expensive and overly fancy.
What’s the truth? It’s much simpler—but simplicity doesn’t generate profits for corporations constantly looking for new ways to sell their processed products.
“Healthy eating” boils down to just three elements:
Quality – Unprocessed food. An apple picked from a tree, not dropped into a can of syrup. A carrot pulled from the ground, not created in a lab. Simple and short ingredient lists. What should ham contain? Meat. If it contains anything else, it’s not meat—it’s a meat-like product.
Proportions – Everything tastes better in the right proportions. It’s not about one meal; it’s about the proportions of everything you eat throughout the day. This applies to vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients. A little bit of everything. Even an app can calculate that for you.
Quantity – The dose makes the poison. Even water can be toxic if you drink too much—6–10 liters within a few hours can be lethal. It’s the same as with water in a bathtub. If you fill it faster than it drains, the tub overflows. If you fill it slower than it drains, the water level decreases. Nutrition works the same way. Eat too much, and you gain weight. Eat too little, and you lose weight. That’s it. No magic. It doesn’t matter whether the calories come from fats, carbs, or alcohol—if there’s a surplus, your body stores it. If there’s a deficit, your body burns stored resources.
Has anyone ever said, “I became a millionaire thanks to food marketplaces”? Yes—their founders and investors who sold shares when they went public. It certainly wasn’t the entrepreneurs or restaurant owners whose backs these marketplaces were built on.
Marketplaces assure small businesses that they’ll gain visibility, but the truth is quite different. The system is designed in a way that makes it impossible for you to stand out. They shove you into generic categories, force you into price wars with competitors, and take your customers in the process. While you’re struggling to survive, they’re taking 30% of every sale, and you don’t even get access to your customers’ email addresses or phone numbers to contact them directly.
As programmers say, “it’s not a bug; it’s a feature.” These systems are intentionally designed to work against you. You become dependent on them, which translates to greater profits for them.
You Can't Blame Someone Who's Spent Their Whole Life Looking Through a Covered Window
Society has a romantic vision: dreams of owning a food business, usually a restaurant, where the owner meets friends, sips wine on the terrace, and watches a beautiful sunset. A place to show off to friends and enjoy good times. But this dream quickly turns into a financial nightmare.
If at this point you feel like you've done something wrong—don't. The sheer amount of information we're bombarded with every day, promoting this vision, makes it easy for even the most astute observer to be misled.
I met a couple of cattle farmers who grew tired of agricultural production and decided to pursue their dream of owning a food business. They had no idea how to manage it. “Luckily,” they took over a business along with its staff, including a manager, head chef, and cooks. It seemed like their "promised land," and they thought they’d soon be able to transition fully from profitable yet exhausting farming to gastronomy.
They reached out to me because, shortly after the takeover, the business became unprofitable. When I started talking with them, troubling details came to light: a 40% food cost, relying solely on one supplier, a business effectively run by the employees, and a contract structured so that the manager didn’t have any performance-based compensation.
The staff assured them it was temporary, that it wasn’t the season, that it was because they were using the highest-quality products, among other things. The myths surrounding this industry are plentiful—I’ve detailed them extensively in "The 23 Biggest Myths About About Catering Management" Ultimately, the manager and the team convinced the owners to change nothing, saying the situation would soon turn around. And so, they were left with a romantic dream and a financial nightmare.
Some people buy yachts, others buy cars, and some buy restaurants. They all share one thing in common—most of them end up pouring money into these ventures.
If you're serious about building a profitable food business, a restaurant—whether it’s fast food, delivery-only, or dine-in—is not the best idea. Statistically, it’s one of the least likely ventures to succeed. 60% fail within two years, 80% within five years, and due to the lack of scalability, it has the smallest chance of ever becoming even a million-dollar business. source
Truths Are Universal
They are timeless and the same across all cultures. Whether we live in the Middle East or the far North, we all want more time for ourselves and our families. We want not only to live longer but also to be healthier, full of energy, and to inhabit strong, capable bodies. We want to avoid doing things we dislike, such as sitting in traffic when a courier could handle it, cleaning when it’s unnecessary, or cooking when we could simply eat something ready-made. Ultimately, we want to feel secure—because it’s our lives at stake. We want to know what we’re putting in our mouths and how it was made.
Traditionally, restaurants have had three main cost categories: food (typically 28–32% of total costs), wages (another 28–32%), and occupancy or property-related costs (22–29%). Based on unit economics, a restaurant should operate within a range of 78–93%, leaving a profit margin of 7–22% (franchise restaurants also pay additional franchise fees to their corporations). Source
The system is built in such a way that the property owner earns, the franchisor earns, the marketplace earns, but the restaurant owner—who comes up with the idea, puts in the work, invests capital, and takes the most risk—if they profit at all, it’s minimal. And when something goes wrong (like restaurant closures during COVID), they lose their lease, franchise agreement, or partnerships and are replaced by another cog in the machine.
You don’t build a house on rented land, and the same goes for not basing your business’s future on other entities. Did you know that McDonald’s doesn’t actually make its money selling hamburgers? They profit from real estate. They own the land their restaurants are built on and rent it out to franchisees. They figured this out long ago and have consistently executed this strategy over the years. Source
It’s up to us whether we keep lining the pockets of corporations profiting from the culinary passion of entrepreneurs. We need to build our own, independent channels for connecting with customers and meeting their needs in the simplest and most convenient ways. Selling through your own website, mobile app, phone, or email—these are tools no one can take from you.
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube could decide tomorrow that your account no longer complies with their policies and shut it down. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them—paid advertising on these platforms can rapidly scale your business. However, if you’re able to contact your customers directly, without intermediaries, your revenue will be secure.
I’ve written more about this in this article.
A Personal Chef at Your Fingertips—Or Rather, Your Smartphone
Delicious, customized, and affordable food for everyday life. Who wouldn’t want a personal chef? Everyone would, but few can afford one. Diet catering is essentially a personal chef, made accessible to the average person thanks to economies of scale—cooking for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people every day.
This model works brilliantly for entrepreneurs because it works brilliantly for customers. Let’s look at how meeting customer needs leaves more money in the entrepreneur’s pocket while allowing for rapid business scaling.
Mass personalization is simple and cost-effective—if you know how to implement it. In diet catering, anywhere from a few to several hundred different meals are prepared daily. This extensive menu ensures that each customer can choose an optimal meal plan that meets their expectations not only in terms of taste but also by excluding ingredients they don’t want or can’t eat, fitting their budget, and balancing calories and macronutrients. Remember the Rubik’s Cube? This is what solving it looks like in practice.
Are you thinking, “But how can you reconcile all that? There are more possible combinations than stars in the sky!” I completely understand. When we started, we faced the same challenge, which is why we decided to solve it. Let me be blunt—without the right tools, optimizing such a selection manually is almost impossible.
At Flambia, it took us 5 years to create and refine an algorithm that considers all these factors, aligns customer needs with production realities, and delivers a seamless solution. By combining production experience, programming, and combinatorics, we made it possible—and ultimately solved this challenge with dedicated software.
Beyond matching their preferences, customers expect affordable prices—ideally only slightly higher than the cost of cooking at home—and free delivery, because, as we know, no one likes paying for it. If you’ve worked in the food service industry, you might think, “That’s absolutely impossible, I know how much it costs to produce a dish in a restaurant.”
Exactly—let’s take a closer look at the differences and why a meal in diet catering can be cheaper than cooking at home.
Diet catering clients order 4–5 meals a day. This makes the number of meals produced enormous, even at a relatively small scale. In my catering service, with 2,000 clients, the kitchen effectively produces nearly 10,000 meals daily.
Labor
A restaurant chef preparing soup can only make enough for a few, at most a dozen, customers. A chef in diet catering uses a massive kettle capable of cooking 500 liters of soup at once. A restaurant chef must prepare fresh meals for customers ordering at various times, whether dining in or for delivery, performing the same tasks multiple times a day. A catering chef prepares a dish only once.
In a restaurant kitchen, prep work—washing, chopping, peeling, slicing—is done manually. At the scale of diet catering, automation becomes cost-effective, so cutting, slicing, peeling, washing, shredding, and grinding are all handled by kitchen machines. This allows the chef to focus on what truly matters—ensuring great flavor and skillfully combining ingredients.
Utilities
Thanks to this production model, the labor, electricity or gas consumption, and food waste per meal are incomparably lower. Moreover, processes are standardized, ensuring better and more consistent flavors.
All of this allows the final product to be offered to customers at more attractive prices than they could achieve by cooking at home. Additionally, the entrepreneur’s margin is significantly higher, reaching 50% or even 60% per dish while maintaining excellent taste and high quality.
Deliveries
Another element that makes diet catering cost-efficient is its delivery model. In restaurants, couriers operate on a "point-to-point" model. This means they deliver one order, return to base, and pick up another. In diet catering, couriers use a "milk run" system—they take all packages at once and deliver them sequentially to different points.
They operate outside peak hours—either early in the morning before people leave for work or late in the afternoon or evening when people are home. This means they avoid traffic and can move around the city much faster. With greater load capacity, they can handle up to 150 orders at a time, compared to a restaurant courier’s 5—30 times more!
Moreover, delivery points are predetermined, allowing for optimized routes. Considering that each customer orders 4–5 meals a day, compared to 1–3 from a restaurant, the cost of delivery per meal is negligible compared to the traditional delivery model used by apps like UberEats. While UberEats’ delivery radius is limited to a few kilometers, diet catering can cover an entire medium-sized city right from the start. As the business scales, intercity deliveries become feasible, thanks to specialized refrigerated fleets.
In my catering business, meals are delivered daily across Poland, covering hundreds of kilometers—all prepared in a single central kitchen.
Property
One of the biggest cost drivers for restaurants is the property itself. This isn’t the case for diet catering. When I started, we operated out of a friend’s apartment. Of course, this isn’t scalable, and we could only handle up to 30 packages a day. We quickly had to find something professional.
Here lies a fundamental difference between the two models—restaurants must be close to the city center. If it’s a sit-in restaurant, the location needs to attract foot traffic. If it’s delivery-focused, couriers need to avoid long distances. These locations are expensive.
Diet catering, however, only requires a spacious kitchen. That’s it. Industrial halls adapted for cooking are perfect for this model. Locations on the outskirts are far cheaper to rent and adapt than those in central areas. As a result, property costs are much less significant in diet catering than in restaurants.
Food Cost
Raw material costs are also incomparably lower, while quality is higher, because you bypass middlemen. At this scale, you don’t buy food from a store; you source it from specialized wholesale suppliers who deliver directly to your kitchen.
You’ll work with the same suppliers that serve supermarkets, which means significantly lower prices and a level of influence over product quality that most restaurants can only dream of. From the perspective of a supplier’s sales team, you’re worth as much as 10 restaurants. They’ll do everything they can to keep you as a client.
Taste
The most important factor for customers is taste. How many days in a row could you eat at the same restaurant before the dishes start to bore you—or worse, disgust you? Diet catering has a unique advantage: menus offer several to even hundreds of dishes daily. The larger the scale, the greater the variety.
This means customers can choose meals tailored to their preferences without ever getting bored. Such variety is impossible to achieve at home—no one has the time to cook five different meals every day.
It’s like comparing public transport to driving your own car. Remember when you didn’t have a driver’s license and taking the subway or bus didn’t seem like a problem? But now that you have a car, you’re willing to pay 10 times more for the comfort of traveling on your own terms, listening to your favorite music, at convenient times, and without the hassle of walking from a bus stop to your destination.
The same applies here—once someone experiences the convenience of diet catering, they’re unlikely to return to their old habits.
Feedback
One of the eternal challenges for chefs is figuring out where and how to gather structured feedback on what customers like and what needs improvement. Have you ever seen a situation where customers, when asked about their experience, politely said everything was fine, but never returned to that restaurant again?
In diet catering, customers can rate individual dishes, leave comments, and provide suggestions via the website or mobile app without feeling like they’re hurting the feelings of a kind server. This provides the kitchen with continuous feedback—not anecdotal insights from one or two customers but structured input from hundreds. This allows for consistent recipe refinement and improvement.
Upfront Payment
One of the biggest pain points in the food service industry is managing cash flow. Taking supplies on credit, worrying whether there will be enough customers this week to pay off debts to suppliers—these are constant stressors. On top of that, there are countless other expenses requiring cash flow: small or large repairs, replacing worn-out dishware, cleaning supplies, and many other hidden costs that add up to create a mountain of obligations.
While some of these costs exist in diet catering as well, there’s one significant difference—you have the guarantee that the service is prepaid. How rare is it to have a guarantee for anything these days? Yet here, you provide a service that has already been paid for! You purchase ingredients not hoping someone will come to try your dishes, but knowing that a customer has already paid for your product and labor.
The funds received from customers can be reinvested into the business, functioning as an interest-free loan.
Advertising and Marketing
What does advertising look like for a typical restaurant? It’s hard to call it efficient. Flyers, sidewalk signs, and Instagram posts are necessary but challenging to measure in terms of return on investment (ROI). For food delivery services using marketplace apps, you’re stuck paying for visibility boosts in the app. You have little control over these efforts, and their effectiveness is limited. Scaling your operations even threefold is tough, let alone growing 10x or 100x.
In diet catering, customers place orders conveniently via a website or mobile app. This makes it incredibly easy to track the user journey and understand which actions are effective and which aren’t. You have access to a full range of advertising tools, such as email marketing, affiliate marketing, or paid ads on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.
Thanks to paid ads, I was able to acquire 2,000 customers by the fourth month of operation. I knew exactly how much I could spend on acquiring a customer and reinvested the funds from prepaid customers to acquire even more.
If you’re interested in effective advertising strategies, read this article. In that article, I explain how to calculate their profitability.
Good for the Body, Good for the Soul
We’ve talked a lot about technical, measurable aspects, but how do you calculate happiness, avoiding burnout, being well-rested, or feeling like you’re helping someone? These intangible elements are crucial to all of us. When starting a business, we want it to be profitable, but we also hope to leave behind a legacy—something that speaks well of us to our families, friends, other people, and future generations.
Do you know the leading cause of death worldwide? Cancer? No, try again. COVID? Not even in the top ten. The answer is cardiovascular diseases, which account for 32% of global deaths. Roughly half of these illnesses are directly caused by poor dietary habits. That means 16% of all global deaths—about 8.5 million people annually—could be prevented with a healthy, balanced diet. That’s 23,287 people dying every day because they chose burgers, chips, and sugary drinks over your delicious, nutritious meals. Source, source, source.
When I realized this, it became clear that this isn’t just about selling food or whether someone orders a small or large portion of fries. This is about delivering tasty, balanced meals that could mean thousands of children won’t grow up as orphans, and countless families won’t lose their siblings prematurely. Through food, you can help entire communities live longer and healthier lives!
Gone are the days of inhumane working conditions in the food industry—12, 14, or even 16-hour shifts. In diet catering, the production process runs like clockwork. Everything is predictable and planned in advance. This allows the team to work at a steady pace, complete their tasks, and go home, instead of scrambling during peak hours in an understaffed restaurant.
Another advantage is the positive impact on the environment. Couriers follow optimized delivery routes, minimizing unnecessary travel. Food preparation consumes far less energy, and waste is significantly reduced both in production and on the customer’s end, thanks to portioned meals tailored to daily needs.
Ride the Wave or Be Left Adrift
As you can see, diet catering is an appealing model for both customers and entrepreneurs. It’s cheaper, more convenient, faster, and better tailored to taste and health preferences. Unlike restaurant meals, often laden with excess fat to enhance flavor, diet catering offers a healthy and flavorful alternative—prepared by chefs who may not be nutritionists but know how to craft delicious and balanced meals. The vision of a personal chef available to everyone is not only realistic but is quickly gaining popularity as societal habits shift.
Looking at various markets, it’s clear there won’t be as many players in diet catering as there are restaurants. The first-mover advantage plays a significant role here. Whoever establishes this business first in a given region will quickly gain market share, achieve economies of scale, expand their offerings, and create enormous entry barriers for competitors.
If you don’t catch this wave now, you’ll be left adrift in the ocean with no choice but to float aimlessly.
If you want to be one of the few who carve out a place in the emerging diet catering market—watch the free training and follow the next steps.
