The recipe for a DIY meal kit
A Taranaki mother-of-four’s new meal subscription service has a catch – unlike other food kits, you don’t get sent any ingredients.
Instead, Melanie Koch has set up Inbox Dinners, which for $11.90 a week sees her email you the recipes and a shopping list for four evening meals.
Koch, a trained nutritionist who has previously worked in sales, said even though it still required a trip to the supermarket it gave people the freedom to choose both when how much they spent.
With recipes able to incorporate either high end products or budget brands, people could end up paying less than they did for some popular meal kits, she said.
The service would also provide more variety for people who were stuck with the same five or six recipes on rotation.
‘‘There’s no packaging, there’s no courier deliveries, no printouts so the footprint is a lot less and the cost is a lot less. The other advantage is people can choose which cuts of meat they want and what produce they want and support local if they want.’’
The cost of the service is the same for a family of two, four or six, as Koch said it doesn’t take her any more time, it would just require increasing amounts of groceries.
The recipes also allowed for substitutes if something was too expensive or included an ingredient you didn’t like.
The idea came from Koch being a nutritionist mainly to mums trying to lose weight.
She would come up with a meal plan for the whole family but kids wouldn’t eat the super healthy recipes with a lot of greens.
So she believes she’s found a gap in the market, with healthy meals the entire family will enjoy.
This week’s recipes include things like beef and refried bean enchiladas, sweet and sour chicken, bacon, egg, and spinach quiche, and fish pie.
Koch cooks all the recipes in her New Plymouth kitchen and tests the meals out of her own family, of control systems engineer husband Shane and four kids Zharn, 17, Nate, 14, Ovie, 2, and Ayla, 1.
She is currently offering only four nights a week as she said families were usually busy some nights with kids’ sport or at the weekends they might have a takeaway.
In the future, Koch hopes to release a fully vegetarian option too.
The whole idea was a couple of years in the making, as she waited until her 2-yearold was at kindy, so the house wasn’t so chaotic.
While Koch only just launched in the last couple of weeks her goal is to get to 650 subscribers.
‘‘I’ve been sitting on the website ready to launch, I’ve just been too scared.’’