A practical guide for anyone who wants to sell weekly meal plans online. Whether you're starting from your home kitchen or adding subscriptions to an existing food business.
Meal prep subscriptions are one of the best business models in food right now. Your customers get healthy, convenient meals delivered on a schedule. You get predictable weekly revenue and can plan your inventory down to the ingredient.
The tricky part has always been the tech. How do you let customers pick their meals each week? How do you handle delivery days? What happens when someone needs to pause for a vacation?
This guide walks through the whole process, from figuring out your niche to getting your first paying subscribers on Shopify.
"Meal prep" is broad. The businesses that do well pick a lane and own it. Here are some niches that work particularly well as subscriptions:
Think gym-goers who need 150g+ protein per day and don't want to cook six chicken breasts every Sunday. These customers are incredibly loyal once they find a service they trust. They care about macros, portion sizes, and consistency.
Parents who want healthy dinners without the planning. You provide pre-portioned ingredients and a recipe card, they cook it in 30 minutes. The subscription model works great here because families eat dinner every single night.
People on restrictive diets have fewer options and are willing to pay more for convenience. If you can nail keto meals that actually taste good, you'll have customers for life.
Lower complexity than full meals, higher margins, and customers often buy in multi-day programs (3-day cleanse, 5-day cleanse). These work well as both one-time purchases and recurring subscriptions.
Pick the niche where you have an edge. Maybe you're a trained chef who knows Mediterranean cooking inside out. Maybe you're a fitness competitor who understands macros. Your personal expertise is what makes your meal prep business different from the next one.
Before you sell a single meal, you need to figure out the legal side. This varies by state and country, but here's the general picture.
Most states require you to prepare food for sale in a licensed commercial kitchen. Some states have cottage food laws that let you start from home, but these usually have revenue caps and restrictions on what you can sell.
If you don't have your own commercial kitchen yet, look into shared kitchen spaces (also called commissary kitchens). You rent time by the hour or day. It's the most common way meal prep businesses get started without a massive upfront investment.
At minimum, you'll typically need a food handler's permit, a business license, and a food establishment permit from your local health department. If you're delivering food, check whether you need a separate delivery or catering license.
Get general liability insurance and product liability insurance. You're selling food that people eat. This is non-negotiable. Most policies for small food businesses run $500 to $2,000 per year.
Don't skip this step. It's not the exciting part, but getting shut down for not having proper permits is way less exciting.
Shopify is the best platform for selling meal prep online. It handles payments, shipping labels, customer accounts, and has a massive app ecosystem for subscriptions (more on that in a minute).
The Basic Shopify plan ($39/month) is plenty to start. You can always upgrade later. Don't overthink this.
Your food needs to look good. Pick a theme with large product images and a clean layout. Dawn (free) works fine. If you want something more polished, Taste or Flavor are popular paid themes built for food brands.
Each meal is a product in Shopify. Add clear photos (natural light, simple backgrounds), list the ingredients, and include nutritional info if your audience cares about that. For meal prep, your product photos are doing most of the selling.
Turn on customer accounts in your Shopify settings. This is important because subscribers will need to log in to manage their meal plans, pause deliveries, or swap meals.
You could sell meals as one-time orders and call it a day. But here's why subscriptions are worth the extra setup.
If you have 50 subscribers paying $120/week, that's $6,000 per week you can count on. You know exactly how much to buy, how much to prep, and how many containers you need. Compare that to hoping customers come back and reorder.
Food waste kills margins. When you know exactly how many orders are coming in, you buy exactly what you need. No more throwing out $200 worth of ingredients because Tuesday was slow.
A one-time customer might spend $80 and never come back. A subscriber at $80/week who stays for 6 months is worth $1,920. That's a 24x difference. Even if some subscribers churn after a month or two, the math still works heavily in your favor.
You spend money to get a customer once. With subscriptions, that same customer keeps paying week after week without you having to re-acquire them. Your marketing budget goes further.
This is where most meal prep businesses hit a wall. Shopify doesn't have built-in subscription support for meal plans. You need an app, and most subscription apps weren't designed for food businesses.
Apps like Recharge, Bold, and Appstle are great for subscribe-and-save on things like coffee or supplements. But meal prep is different. Your customers need to pick specific meals from a menu that changes weekly. They need to choose a delivery day. And they need to be able to pause, skip a week, or swap meals without emailing you.
Most Shopify meal prep stores we've seen are stuck with rigid setups where customers can't self-manage their subscription at all. Every pause, every item swap, every schedule change requires the store owner to do it manually. That doesn't scale.
A meal subscription app needs to handle a few things that generic subscription tools don't:
This is exactly why we built MealSubs. It's a Shopify subscription app designed specifically for meal plan businesses. Build-a-box, delivery day scheduling, customer self-service, and flexible pricing are all built in. No workarounds needed.
There are three main ways to price a meal subscription, and the right choice depends on your business:
Flat fee pricing is the simplest. Customers pay a fixed amount per week regardless of which meals they pick. Something like $99/week for 10 meals. Easy for customers to understand, easy for you to forecast revenue.
Per-item pricing charges based on what customers select. A chicken breast bowl might be $12, a smoothie might be $8. Customers pay for exactly what they pick. This works well when your meals have very different costs.
Discounted per-item pricing gives subscribers a discount on each item. Maybe 15% off or $2 off per meal compared to one-time pricing. This incentivizes the subscription while still letting you price individual meals differently.
MealSubs supports all three. You can set this up in about five minutes from the app dashboard.
Pricing is where a lot of meal prep businesses get stuck. Price too low and you burn out working for nothing. Price too high and nobody subscribes.
Add up your ingredient cost per meal, packaging (containers, labels, insulation), kitchen rental time, and delivery costs. This is your cost per meal. For most meal prep businesses, this lands somewhere between $4 and $8 per meal.
If a meal costs you $5 to make and deliver, price it at $12 to $15. That 3x markup gives you room for marketing costs, the occasional mistake, and an actual profit. Some premium niches (organic, keto, athlete meals) can push to 4x or higher.
A 10-meal weekly plan at $12/meal is $120/week per subscriber. With 50 subscribers, that's $6,000/week in revenue. If your cost per meal is $5, your weekly ingredient and delivery cost is $2,500, leaving $3,500 for kitchen rent, marketing, your salary, and profit.
Run these numbers for your specific situation before you launch. The subscription model only works if the unit economics make sense at your price point.
Give subscribers 10-15% off compared to one-time purchases. This makes the subscription feel like a deal and reduces churn. The discount pays for itself through the higher lifetime value of a recurring customer.
Your store is set up, your meals are ready, your subscription app is configured. Now you need actual customers.
Your first 10-20 subscribers will almost certainly come from people you know. Friends, family, coworkers, gym buddies. This isn't embarrassing, it's how every food business starts. These early customers give you feedback, testimonials, and photos you can use to attract strangers.
Food is inherently visual. Post your meal prep process, your finished meals, your packaging. Behind-the-scenes content does really well. People want to see the person making their food and the kitchen it comes from. You don't need fancy equipment. A phone with good lighting is enough.
Search for local food groups, neighborhood groups, and fitness groups in your delivery area. Don't spam them with ads. Share genuinely useful content (meal prep tips, nutrition info) and mention your business when it's relevant.
Offer a discount code to members of local gyms, yoga studios, or CrossFit boxes. Leave flyers or sample meals. Fitness people are your ideal customer for meal prep subscriptions, and gyms are where they hang out.
Optimize your Shopify store for searches like "meal prep delivery in [your city]" and "weekly meal plan [your city]". Add a blog with recipes and nutrition tips. This won't bring customers tomorrow, but in 3-6 months, organic search can become your most cost-effective channel.
Start with 8-12 meal options, not 30. A smaller menu is easier to prep, easier to cost out, and easier for customers to choose from. You can always expand once you have steady orders.
Your time is worth something. Factor in your labor, not just ingredient costs. A lot of meal prep businesses charge $8/meal when it should be $13. They burn out in three months and quit. Price for sustainability.
If every pause request, address change, or meal swap requires an email to you, you'll drown in support as you grow. Use a subscription app that gives customers a self-service portal. This is one of those things that seems minor at 10 subscribers but becomes a nightmare at 100.
Your meals need to arrive looking as good as they taste. Invest in quality containers that seal properly and keep food fresh. Label everything clearly with the meal name, ingredients, reheating instructions, and a best-by date. This is part of your brand.
MealSubs is the Shopify subscription app built specifically for meal plan businesses. Build-a-box, delivery scheduling, customer self-service. Set up in 5 minutes, zero transaction fees.
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