Trendsurfing: Meal-assembly stores (The Times)
By David Rowan
Here's a challenge for the post-feminist Times woman. You're busy juggling your family, social life and career, somehow managing to wipe surfaces and supervise homework in between shutting down your laptop and dashing out to meet the girlfriends. Something has to give, but you're damned sure it won't be the quality of the children's evening meal. Yet how are you going to provide a nutritious home-made dinner each night, if your schedule allows barely ten minutes?
A culinary trend sweeping North America may offer a solution. A new type of "make-it-yourself" food store is establishing a hold in cities from Alaska to Florida, offering busy women a short cut to domestic serenity. Typically located in malls or suburban retail strips, these shops are glitzy meal-production lines where customers can bulk-prepare suppers to take home and freeze. Everything is provided, from the recipes to the peeled, chopped vegetables. All a domestic goddess need do is turn up with friends, spend an hour or two gossiping over a Shiraz, and gradually work her way around the tubs of ingredients as she assembles her own easy-cook meals.
The first "meal-assembly" stores hit Washington state four years ago, since when the concept has become hotter than a spicy phall curry. There are now around 700, mostly franchised, with dozens more opening each month, and even a trade association deliciously named the Easy Meal Preparation Association. The shop chains, with names such as Let's Eat Dinner and Super Suppers, tend to stay remarkably close to the original formula, with websites allowing customers to choose menus in advance of booking slots in the shops. Here they are given all the portion-controlled fresh ingredients that their recipes demand. All the customer has to do is mix the ingredients together in the right order and take the results home in resealable bags or trays ready to be deep-frozen. The stores even provide labels explaining how to thaw and cook every white-bean cassoulet or spinach lasagna.
The attraction isn't simply the cost, which, at typically £16 for a main course that will feed four, is pitched somewhere between the price of independent home cooking and take-out. Nor is it just the time saved by bulk-preparing a dozen family dinners at once. A more subtle reason for the stores' success is their willingness to celebrate the lot of today's hyperachieving wife and mother. "We're about getting them to school, a soccer game or band practice on time, about mothers who have too much to do and too little time to do it," explains the pitch for Dream Dinners, founded by Stephanie Allen, "a working mother", and her friend Tina Kuna, and widely credited with popularising the trend. The company's mission is to "bring families together around the dinner table", even those families where time, let alone cooking skills, are virtually non-existent.
The concept has yet to cross the Atlantic - the closest we have come is the build-it-yourself teddy-bear shop - but Trendsurfing sees opportunities. These stores tap into plenty of today's emerging trends, from concerns over nutritional quality to the desire for participation that is turning millions of us into amateur filmmakers and podcasters. And by encouraging women (and few customers seem to be men) to visit as groups of friends, they also promise camaraderie, or what marketers are calling "the socialisation of the retail experience".
Sure it's cheating. So what if your seafood risotto was effectively cooked by numbers? Where maternal guilt is concerned, partly hand-made has the edge over supermarket-bought. And who'd put a price on alleviating guilt?
(The Times Magazine, June 10 2006)
Here's a challenge for the post-feminist Times woman. You're busy juggling your family, social life and career, somehow managing to wipe surfaces and supervise homework in between shutting down your laptop and dashing out to meet the girlfriends. Something has to give, but you're damned sure it won't be the quality of the children's evening meal. Yet how are you going to provide a nutritious home-made dinner each night, if your schedule allows barely ten minutes?
A culinary trend sweeping North America may offer a solution. A new type of "make-it-yourself" food store is establishing a hold in cities from Alaska to Florida, offering busy women a short cut to domestic serenity. Typically located in malls or suburban retail strips, these shops are glitzy meal-production lines where customers can bulk-prepare suppers to take home and freeze. Everything is provided, from the recipes to the peeled, chopped vegetables. All a domestic goddess need do is turn up with friends, spend an hour or two gossiping over a Shiraz, and gradually work her way around the tubs of ingredients as she assembles her own easy-cook meals.
The first "meal-assembly" stores hit Washington state four years ago, since when the concept has become hotter than a spicy phall curry. There are now around 700, mostly franchised, with dozens more opening each month, and even a trade association deliciously named the Easy Meal Preparation Association. The shop chains, with names such as Let's Eat Dinner and Super Suppers, tend to stay remarkably close to the original formula, with websites allowing customers to choose menus in advance of booking slots in the shops. Here they are given all the portion-controlled fresh ingredients that their recipes demand. All the customer has to do is mix the ingredients together in the right order and take the results home in resealable bags or trays ready to be deep-frozen. The stores even provide labels explaining how to thaw and cook every white-bean cassoulet or spinach lasagna.
The attraction isn't simply the cost, which, at typically £16 for a main course that will feed four, is pitched somewhere between the price of independent home cooking and take-out. Nor is it just the time saved by bulk-preparing a dozen family dinners at once. A more subtle reason for the stores' success is their willingness to celebrate the lot of today's hyperachieving wife and mother. "We're about getting them to school, a soccer game or band practice on time, about mothers who have too much to do and too little time to do it," explains the pitch for Dream Dinners, founded by Stephanie Allen, "a working mother", and her friend Tina Kuna, and widely credited with popularising the trend. The company's mission is to "bring families together around the dinner table", even those families where time, let alone cooking skills, are virtually non-existent.
The concept has yet to cross the Atlantic - the closest we have come is the build-it-yourself teddy-bear shop - but Trendsurfing sees opportunities. These stores tap into plenty of today's emerging trends, from concerns over nutritional quality to the desire for participation that is turning millions of us into amateur filmmakers and podcasters. And by encouraging women (and few customers seem to be men) to visit as groups of friends, they also promise camaraderie, or what marketers are calling "the socialisation of the retail experience".
Sure it's cheating. So what if your seafood risotto was effectively cooked by numbers? Where maternal guilt is concerned, partly hand-made has the edge over supermarket-bought. And who'd put a price on alleviating guilt?
(The Times Magazine, June 10 2006)
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