Thursday, April 16, 2009

What is e-mealplanning.com?

I have become so anxious to get rolling with the business, but I am trying to reign it in and not get ahead of myself. It's important to take things one step at a time and roll out the business properly. I've been writing a business plan, a market research survey and doing research on advertising options. But I thought I would share some details regarding the concept and basic services. It's important that I start getting the word out and I'm interested in finding a few guinea pigs to try out the services. :-)

Here is the basic description-

E-mealplanning.com is a full service weekly meal/menu planning service. Primarily web-based, offering three service plan options. The mission of e-mealplanning.com is to become the premier website for meal and menu planning as well as an information portal to all the quality cooking and recipe resources on the web. The three service options. The first level is a low-cost weekly e-mail subscription newsletter that will include a list of meals complete with recipes and shopping list. There will be more than 7 meals so that the subscriber can have some choice and from there create their upcoming week's meals based on their schedule and what recipes look good to them. The newsletter will be informative with tips and resource information. The second level service will cost a little more but it will be a customized weekly meal plan based on personal consultations to discuss factors like schedule, food likes/dislikes, allergies, cooking ability, etc. It will also include constant contact to ensure the meal plans are working out. The third level of service will mostly work within my local area as it will be the weekly custom meal plans plus a monthly in-home visit to cook together. This would include helping to organize the kitchen and create several make-ahead meals for the month.
I don’t plan to create a whole new recipe website. There are many quality recipe websites already. I want to make weekly meal planning easy for those who don’t care to do it themselves. This may also include shopping research such as sales and where to find the best prices for items. Plus, the web has grown so large that even though you can Google a topic, you then have to wade through the results to find what you want. I want to lighten the load of the busy person who wants to save money and time.
I have been working on tracking my own family’s grocery and food spending habits so that I have a baseline figure for a family of four. April seems pretty good, except it turned out to not be typical since we had spring break and we ended up taking a trip. I will have to subtract that from the spending and see if it still seems reasonable or look to use May as a better gauge. It's important that I my services can provide value to someone. I don't want to be a luxury item that is solely just for convenience.

The website is going to take more time to plan and build out, but I will have something temporary up soon.

I read this article in a recent issue of Time Magazine and it made me feel good about taking this leap of faith. The New Internet Start Up Boom: Get Rich Slow

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