Halifax Company Making It Easy and Affordable To Have A Chef Cook Your Meals
HALIFAX – Those of us who love good food but hate cooking (or don’t have the time) have a big problem. We either spend time in the kitchen over a stove when we’d rather do something else, or we drain our wallets on takeout and delivery.
It’s a pick-your-poison scenario, as long as the poison isn’t in your food.
But a new Halifax company has found a way to deliver healthy meals to customers’ doors while keeping down the expense of ordering out food.
Easy Platter has six chefs, with a variety of specialties, who will cook your meals to your strict dietary standards and tastes. You can pay for the chef to come into YOUR kitchen and cook with your groceries, or you can have the meals pre-cooked and delivered to your door.
Unlike other meal-kit services, there is no cooking or prepping needed.
“All you have to do is eat,” says Easy Platter’s founder Manny Singh.
Having a trained chef cook a week’s worth of your meals using healthy ingredients sounds expensive, but Singh claims many of his longest clients have cut their food bills by 30-40 percent by using their service.
One of the cost-saving advantages of using Easy Platter is it prevents you from going to the grocery store yourself. How does that save money, you ask? As Singh explains, most of us tend to impulse-buy unhealthy or expensive food we don’t need.
“When you go to the store, you’re like, ‘ah I want this, I want that-this thing is on sale, let’s buy that.’ But when we have a professional going in, to prepare those exact meals, they’re buying those exact portions,” says Singh.
“Some of our clients are on a healthy diet-they want to lose weight; maybe some of them are on a paleo diet or a protein diet – but due to impulse purchases they are buying other stuff.”
Easy Platter’s website also has a calculator that will tell you how much a certain weekly meal plan will cost if you choose to order. According to this application, meal plans range in cost from $8-$10.60 per serving (excluding the cost of groceries).
Singh is hoping to make the service even more affordable soon. He has been in talks with Halifax stores about getting wholesale prices on products, which he promises to pass along to the customer.
“We’ve partnered with some agencies…some grocery stores locally and we are partnering with them to offer wholesale prices,” says Singh. “So, when we get a discount, we want to pass it back to the client and not hold it to our chest.”
Singh’s business idea began back when he and his wife Poleen were living in Montreal. Much like their future customers, they found themselves either spending too much time in the kitchen, or too much money on delivery.
“We love food, by the way…we love to cook as well, but we didn’t want to make it into a chore,” says Singh.
During their two years in Montreal, the couple did research on their Easy platter idea, by talking to hundreds of chefs and families.
When they returned home to Halifax in 2020, they decided to put their idea into action by setting up a booth and signing up their first five clients, just to see if the concept would work. Now, Easy Platter cooks more than 300 meals a week for their network of clients.
The success of the company since it launched nearly a year ago already has Singh thinking of expansion. He has gotten messages from people in British Columbia, Ontario, and the United States, wondering if Easy Platter could ever be available in those areas.
Singh says he is working on an Ontario model for the business.
Derek Montague is a Huddle reporter in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].
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