Your kitchen has one ceiling, and it is set by whichever step runs out of hours first. Enter your crew, your production window and the minutes each meal takes to cook and to pack. The calculator returns the daily ceiling, the number of subscribers it supports, and which of the two steps is the bottleneck. Adding people to the step that is not the bottleneck buys nothing.
Cook time per meal is the whole batch divided by the meals it yields, not the time for one portion. A 90-minute batch that yields 60 portions is 1.5 minutes per meal.
| Cooking could produce | 0 |
| Packing could produce | 0 |
| Your actual ceiling | 0 |
| Meals per subscriber per day | 0 |
The two numbers above are almost never equal, and the smaller one is your kitchen. If cooking tops out at 450 meals and packing at 600, you produce 450 — the packing crew simply finishes early. Hiring another packer changes nothing at all.
So fix the smaller number and only the smaller number. Then recalculate, because the ceiling moves to the other step and the next hour of your money belongs there instead. This is the whole of capacity planning in a kitchen: find the step that runs out first, widen it, look again.
Two things this deliberately leaves out: fridge and cold-room space, which caps how far ahead you can cook, and delivery, which caps how many drops fit in a morning. Either can become the real ceiling once the kitchen steps are wide enough.
Kitchen capacity for a meal prep line — the full method, including the constraints this calculator leaves out.
How many customers a meal prep business needs to break even — pair the ceiling with the floor.
Meal prep staffing — who you need on the line before the numbers above change.
Food cost calculator — what one of those meals costs you to make.
Pricing calculator — what to charge for them once you know the cost.
