Grow your meal prep business with ecommerce

Meal preparation services are increasing in number and for good reason! They provide a quick and affordable option for busy customers who are looking for a way to eat healthy and save time on food prep during the week.

If you’re getting ready to launch your meal prep business, read on for ideas and best practices on how to run an efficient, customer-friendly ordering process!

Selling Fully Customizable Meals

Let your customers select their main course, side dish, and even a dessert to make the meal of their dreams. If you have premium entree options like salmon or other expensive proteins, be sure to add an additional cost to each to ensure you're making enough of a profit. Use Castiron’s Product Customizations on each product to list your entree, side, and dessert options. You can limit the number of options customers select for each meal, limiting them to one entree, side, and dessert. Because you’ll be creating each meal and mixing and matching sides and entrees yourself, we suggest the price per meal be highest on an offering like this.

Selling Pre-Made Meals

Do you have tried and true meal pairings — you know, the ones everyone always orders? Have you noticed a best-selling combination? 

Offer set meals with no customizations for easy, repeatable meals that are crowd favorites with your customers. Let customers add as many of each meal as they'd like for the quickest, simplest experience. You can also set meal-specific pricing to account for premium ingredient costs, if applicable.

How to Offer Volume Discounts for Meal Prep

We commonly see meal prep services incentivize customers to make larger dollar purchases by discounting the price per meal as the customer orders more food. The two most common ways this is done is through Variety Packs and Coupon Codes offering discounts at certain cart dollar thresholds.

Variety Packs

Offering a variety of meals to include throughout a week is key to ensuring customers don't get tired eating the same thing every day. Let your customers select the number of meals they want to purchase, and choose from a custom list of variety pack products for easy checkout!

Coupon Codes
It’s easy to create a coupon code in Castiron that can only be used on orders above a certain dollar amount. Usually, meal prep businesses offer a 10-20% discount depending on the size of the order. You can promote your coupon code via your email marketing and on social media. Let your customers know that the more they order, the cheaper their meals are!

How to Incentivize Repeat Meal Prep Orders

One easy way to create customer loyalty is to provide past purchasers with a discount on their next purchase. This creates a subscription-like model and encourages customers to (hopefully) continue ordering because they’re getting a deal. 

We make it easy to keep track of your customer’s order history. Access your customer's previous orders and send them a message through Castiron to let them know they’ll receive a discount on their next order.

Offering Weekly or Biweekly Meal Prep Services

Some food entrepreneurs prefer to sell family-style meals that are only available for pickup or delivery on certain dates, so that they only have to prepare a handful of main dishes per day. Use the Categories functionality in Castiron to denote which date each family style meal is for and make it clear that each contains multiple servings (and price accordingly!).