Jenny Swider scattered the rice pilaf on the bottom of the pan. She placed three frozen chicken breasts on top. Over the chicken, she sprinkled diced ham, Swiss cheese and white béchamel sauce.
One might think the next step would be to place it in the oven. But Swider wasn’t at home. She was at Super Suppers, a meal-preparation store at the Lincoln Mall, creating a meal to put in her cooler and take to her home in Portsmouth, a good 37 miles away.
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She said she makes the trek about once a month because she likes the healthy meals. She knows exactly what’s in them, because she assembles the ingredients herself.
And with four children, aged 8 months to 7 years, Swider said, spending an hour at the store preparing six to 12 meals for her family saves her a lot of weeknight time and headaches.
The concept is simple: Go to the location, choose one of the 12 food-prep stations (each has a different recipe, along with suggestions for side dishes), grab a container, assemble the meal, then take it home and put it in the freezer.
Meal-preparation stores started about four years ago, said Mark Economou, co-owner of Super Suppers in Lincoln along with his wife, Bridget. When they signed the franchise contract last December, he said, there were 40 Super Suppers in the United States. Now, there are 220.
What’s more, Super Suppers isn’t the region’s only business of its kind. An independent meal-preparation store called The Mixing Table opened last month in Seekonk, owned and run by three working mothers.
“The concept … it spoke to me right away,” said Susan Casper, co-owner of The Mixing Table and a part-time physician’s assistant. “I was a customer first. It made my life so much easier … I was tired of rotisserie chicken and frozen meatballs.”
Co-owner Vanessa Weiner, a part-time personal trainer, said she liked the meal-preparation concept because it is a healthier alternative to the frozen foods in the grocery store.
Neither Super Suppers nor The Mixing Table offers any foods containing trans fats.
Both say their foods are fresh, though they come from different vendors; Super Suppers gets most of its fresh ingredients from national food supplier Sysco, whereas The Mixing Table uses a variety of local vendors.
Both rotate their recipes every month – but Super Suppers’ are developed by chefs at a culinary school in Fort Worth, Texas, and supplied through a corporate recipe bank.
Meals at both stores are priced about the same, between $3.20 and $4 per serving, which means that if a customer prepared a six-serving chicken cordon bleu, it would cost between $19.20 and $24. Discounts are available as customers buy more meals.
Both businesses also have a pick-up freezer, so people can walk in and purchase a meal that’s already prepared and frozen. Startup costs for each store were between $150,000 and $250,000.
Economou said he and his wife chose to go with Super Suppers because it had the best-tasting food, and as a franchise, “they do the research for you. They do the thinking for you. We’re not professional chefs.”
The Mixing Table owners said they chose to be independent because they wanted to be part of the recipe design and testing, according to co-owner Tracy Edes, who has worked in the hospitality industry for 18 years. They hired a chef to create the initial recipes, Edes said, but also decided that each month they would invite a different local chef to create a recipe.
“It will help us develop our food credibility, in the food world and in the general public,” she said.
Asked whether she thinks meal preparation businesses will be a lasting trend, Edes said yes, because she knows what dinner time is like for her, as a working mom with two children. “People’s lives aren’t going to get any easier,” she said.
Mark Economou offered a similar comment. He and his wife have two children, ages 4 and 6.
“Society’s changed,” he said. “Moms and dads work. And people are becoming more health-conscious.”
