Make and bake: the new fast-food trend for busy people

For Clare Doherty, a working mother, finding the time and energy to cook dinner is a constant challenge.

It is a challenge many families in D.C. and across the country know all too well.

She believes she has found a solution through the meal-preparation industry — or meal-prep businesses, as they are known.

Doherty explains, “It basically helps make dinner prep easier. There is no cleanup, [and] you don’t have to think about … what to make for dinner.”

Here’s how meal-prep businesses work: Customers schedule an appointment and make their meal selections.

Each store offers about 15 entr�e and dessert choices. In about two hours, you can prepare 12 meals that each serve four to six people at a cost of about $200.

Each meal selection has a preparation station with pre-diced and -sliced ingredients. The customer prepares each meal in disposable pans or freezer bags and takes the meals home to freeze.

No cooking is done at the facilities — that is left for the customers to do at home.

According to the industry website www.easymealprep.com, there are seven meal-prep stores in Virginia and five in Maryland.

Since the first meal-prep business started in 1999, the concept has been simple and successful.

“Most people come because they want to have a home-cooked meal but they don’t have time to prepare it, make it and clean it up,” says Dawn Brown, general manager of Let’s Dish, a meal-prep business in Gaithersburg.

The offerings for April are as familiar as they are diverse:

• Let’s Dish offers cheese ravioli primavera and honey glazed pork chops.

•Dinner Done in Centreville, Va., is dishing up gorgonzola beef filets, old-fashioned meat loaf and spicy shrimp on linguine.

• Dream Dinners, with locations in Rockville and Silver Spring, Md., provides ingredients to prepare a Parisian chicken recipe with tomatoes, garlic and herbs.

Brown says she makes amendments to the menus handed down from headquarters to include more East Coast favorites like crab quesadillas.

For the herbivores out there, many businesses offer two vegetarian meals and two recipes that can be easily modified into vegetarian meals.

Meal-prep businesses also cater to a health-conscious crowd. Doherty lives in D.C., but she “dishes” at the Ashburn, Va., location of Let’s Dish for a break from fast food and frozen dinners.

“I know the ingredients that are in it, so it’s not like I’m eating frozen stuff every night. I want a healthier option,” Doherty says.

Many customers, like Doherty, grew up in homes where their mothers cooked and the family sat down for dinner every night.

Easy Meal Preparation Association director Bert Vermeulen says the meal-prep industry represents a backlash against fast food and a return to the idea that families should sit down together for dinner.

“Fast food is still a great thing, but that’s not what everyone wants every day. It’s different. You have a very different sense of pride than if you were dishing out a Big Mac,” Vermeulen says.

Brown says she would have to agree.

“I grew up with my mom cooking,” she says. “I think this is the way to get back to that old value of cooking at home.”

Robert Nasser, owner of Dinner Done, has seen a boom in his business in recent months and has a theory as to why meal-prep businesses have been successful: “We’re a nation of convenience addicts. Anything that makes it easier will draw a lot of people.”

The number of stores nationwide tripled from December 2004 to December 2005.

There is no meal-prep business in D.C. yet, and Nasser says he won’t be starting the trend.

“You couldn’t pay me to open a store there,” he says. “The price of commercial real estate is way too much.”

But Vermeulen hints there may be one opening soon in Georgetown: “It will be in the city [proper] as well. It just takes a while.”

Local meal-prep businesses include:

Let’s Dish
44260 Ice Rink Plaza #122
Ashburn, Va. 20147
(705) 858-7900

Dinner Done
13860D Braddock Road
Centreville, Va.
(703) 266-4004

Dinner My Way
14215F Centreville Square
Centreville, Va.
(703) 266-4200

Dream Dinners
1701 Rockville Pike, Space B-7
Rockville, Md.
(301) 770-9555

Dream Dinners
720 Cloverly St.
Silver Spring, Md.
(301) 879-4707