If you've ever been curious about owning a meal prep business

answering all your questions

Last week on instagram I opened the floor for people to ask any questions they might have about owning a small food business. Since I started posting online (mostly about this very thing) I’ve received lots of questions about how to get started doing something similar. It seems that many (or a vocal few) of you are dreaming of quitting your day jobs and starting a food business of your own. So, here are the answers to all your burning questions as well as some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

I’ve written about this before here but one thing to note is that I didn’t start the business. Collin started Scratch Made about 8 years ago now and he’s grown it from a weekends-only side hustle to his full time gig to now 3 people’s full time gig. We started working together a few years ago in a part time capacity and it’s grown from there.

Before Collin and I started working together, I had my own small food business (that’s how we met!) and throughout that process I relied heavily on friends who had navigated something similar. They gave me advice ranging from big picture to what vendors they used for packaging. So, I’m answering these questions not as an expert, but as a friend who has some semblance of relevant experience that can hopefully help you out a little.

Rather than trying to summarize, I’m just going to approach this as a rapid fire q+a and get through every question that I got. If you have more questions, drop them in the comments and I’ll either answer there or expand on them in the coming weeks!

Collin and farmer Jon. Up until recently, his farm is where we got almost all of our produce for Scratch Made.

Big picture:

• When did you start?

Collin started Scratch Made about 8 years ago. When he began, he was working full time in restaurants. On the side, he and his friend started doing pop ups all along the east coast and eventually started doing some small scale meal prep for a few customers. He did it on a part time basis for a few years before it grew to become his full time job. I started cooking with him about 4 years ago.

• What inspired it?

Scratch Made largely came about because of demand. He already had a customer base from people who came into the restaurant and who attended his pop ups and a couple of them started asking about prepared weekly meals. It started with just one family and eventually grew by word of mouth.

• When did you know you had something special?

I think it was probably the first time that I posted a video chronicling everything I made one week for Scratch Made. This was early on in us working together and at the time I expected it to be a short term thing. The video did way better than I expected and people wanted to learn more. Sort of like how Scratch Made was born out of customer requests, the interest that people showed in the process helped guide us to work together more. Plus, we found out pretty quickly that we kinda liked working together.

• What do you recommend in terms of culinary education?