Are you always getting compliments on your cooking? Are you the one who plans the meals for big celebrations, family get togethers and special occasions? Do you have cooking or meal prep experience gained from a volunteer activity or job? If so, a cooking side hustle might just be a good fit for you. 

If you've ever watched a cooking show on channels like PBS, the Food Network, etc., you know what a cooking and meal prep side hustle looks like. Picture yourself in the role of the show host, making your favorite meals and sharing your recipes on camera. 

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If you're someone who loves to create and prepare meals, you could do something similar with a business that enables you to share the art of cooking.

Providing cooking classes and adding a meal prep side hustle can be just what you need to bring in extra income from home.  And if you're already prepping meals, that's even better. 

It's the perfect way to help potential customers take charge of their weekly eating, reach their health and weight loss goals, save money and conquer their busy schedules.

Meal prepping is also a great way to help busy families organize and manage their freezers and pantries, thus helping them save money, de-clutter and de-stress. 

If you're already doing it, or even if you're brand new to it, you can get started with a business that utilizes your love of cooking and your organizational skills! 

What Does It Mean to Meal Prep?

If you're not 100% sure what's involved, let's start with a definition. Meal prepping is choosing a day of the week to batch cook and prepare whole meals or parts of dishes ahead of schedule.

Meal prep is not about a particular kind of food. The video below shows you how to prep vegan meals, but you could prep any combination of food or cooking style your audience is looking for.

It's really an organizational tool that's particularly popular among busy people (and who isn't busy these days) because it can save a lot of time. Take a look at 7 Easy Ways to Meal Pre for Beginners for ideas.  

Starting a meal prep side hustle from home can help you accomplish your income goals while helping your audience reach their nutritional goals as well. 

Take a look at an example of a meal prep session to see how it works. I love Goodful's meal prep videos, especially the ones with Tabitha Brown because she adds a combination of the demonstration, a story and a little humor that makes her videos informative and fun.

Check out the video below to see how she preps a vegan meal in 90 minutes.

Your business could be what you want it to be, and include the components you want. That's the beauty of having your own side hustle.

You make it unique because you would add your personality and flair to the mix. You would have a ton of content to choose from, depending on your niche or area of specialty. 

For example your could show families how to organize, cook and prep meals while reaping the benefits of having a plan. You could show them how to save money and time creating delicious, nutritious meals without breaking the bank.  

Have customers tuning in each week to learn how to make pre-made meals that they can on hand can reduce the stress that accompanies the question many of us are asking each day... What's for dinner? 

Meal prepping can also help families use higher quality ingredients over pre-packaged, pre-made meals bought in grocery stores. Avoiding preservatives, coloring, and additives and eating fresh ingredients can help to improve their energy, and overall health. Meal prepping can also help control portion sizes, enabling them reach their weight loss and nutrition goals.

Prepping meals really boils down to dedicating a block of time each week to batch-cook ingredients or prepare full meals for the week. This gives families a lot more options each day, versus trying to figure it out as they go. 

It can be as simple as chopping a bunch of veggies for salads and stirring together a sauce for the week, or as involved as cooking and portioning full recipes.

Keeping It Real About Cooking

Prepping and cooking meals can be a dreaded task that just doesn't get done... that time consuming thing that you hate after a long day at work. It can eat up a lot of time, even if you're working from home. 

Just deciding what to eat each day can get old if there isn't a plan. Most families, when faced with the dilemma of deciding what's for dinner, will end up throwing "something" together that may or may not be nutritious, or even appealing. 

If all else fails and they can't make a decision, many families end up ordering out, which again means having a non-nutritious meal that you gobble down at the end of the day.  

The goal of having a meal prep side hustle should be to make your audience's lives easier by improving nutrition, and saving time.  It should give your audience a head start on the week, and help them feel more in control of what they're eating and how they are spending their time.

How to Get Started

Finding and Connecting with an Audience

You'll need a way to communicate with your audience and spread the word about your meal prep side hustle business. This will involve selecting a platform like a YouTube Channel or a blog. 

The picture above shows a page on our demo site where we show entrepreneurs how a blog can be used as a platform that helps them launch and grow an online business.

To get some ideas and learn more about how a cooking site can function, visit our demo page for more information.

Both of these platforms are relatively easy to set up and they will enable you to build an audience of raving fans who can't wait to see your next creation!

Start Cooking with Social Media

It's important to promote your cooking business by using free tools like social media. It's important to optimize your social media accounts to send followers to your landing page. 

You'll also need to sign up for social media accounts for your business. Next you'll need great looking visuals and a regular posting schedule. This will enable you to build an audience of followers. 

Once you have a platform and social media accounts, you will need to send out great looking, delectable meal ideas and new content to your followers to attract an audience to your new business. 

You'll also want to take lots of photos and videos of you shopping at the grocery store, your prep work and your finished products. You'll also want to take photos of the equipment you use to create and prep meals, sharing your own unique personality and style.  

Maintain these photos so that they can be used in social media and on various places on your platform (blog or video channel). You may need to purchase additional storage, since photo and video files can be quite large.  

A Basic Meal Prep Side Hustle Process

Once you have your platform set up and running, you'll need to take the following steps: 

• Set up videos, audio files (podcast episodes) and blog posts (tutorials and recipes) to attract an audience (see equipment below)
• Create meal plans for various cuisines and diet goals.
• Fill out your grocery list.
• Get cooking!
• Use recipes that have an overlap in ingredients.
• Cook/chop staple ingredients ahead of time for mix-and-match bowls.
• Use your freezer to your full advantage.

Conducting Market Research

It's important to understand and attract your ideal customers, the problems they face and the area of specialty (niche) they are in. Will your meal prep side hustle business work with families, individuals, individuals that have specific needs, special cuisines, etc. 

Narrowing your focus, performing your due diligence and conducting market research will help you reach your income goals much faster.

There are so many areas you can specialize in with meal prep. For example, you can specialize in meal prepping to save money. Providing money saving tips, freezer prep, special dietary needs, or if you have an area of specialty, pick the cuisine and types of foods you enjoy creating and use them as your specialty. 

Creating Weekly Meal Plans

To start, create simple meal plans using your favorite recipes. Make it easy by creating a template using Google Docs or Word that can be used as a starting point for each of your plans.

Your template should include a chart that includes all the days of the week with each of the three meals (and snacks) mapped out for each day.

Set up Your Grocery Lists

Show your audience how to shop for staples they can use during meal prep, the best equipment, containers and methods to use to make their prepping quick and easy.  

Make buying groceries easy with a checklist template that has the primary items listed so that all they have to do is check off items as they travel down various aisles at the store. 

You can also show your audience how to use apps like Rakuten, iBotta and others to save money and time with checklists that are built into the apps. 

You can create a list that allows your users to rearrange grocery items to mimic the layout of their favorite grocery stores, using a Word doc. This will make it easy to rearrange the ingredients needed so that you are working from the back of the store forward to the front saving time and energy!

Let the Fun Begin!

Now that you have your meal plan and you've done your grocery shopping, it's time to cook!

In the beginning, the best strategy is to pick easy recipes with ten ingredients or less so that cooking day isn't long, drawn out or overwhelming.

It's also important to choose recipes that are easy to cook and are ready within less than an hour. Another time saver is to pick recipes that have an overlap in ingredients.  Recipes that use the same protein, carbs and veggies but use different sauces so that you're not running out and buying five different types of vegetables or a ton of different cuts of meat.

Meal Prep Containers and Equipment

There will also be lots of great tools like the Instant pot, slow cookers, choppers, the Inspiralizer, and blenders all the way

to the types of food storage and freezer bags, parchment paper, foil and more you'll use when prepping meals.

There will be apps you can use for dieters, recipes, and more make meal prep easy. 

You'll need a video camera and lighting equipment when making videos. We have an article on how to set up a YouTube channel that you can check out to get started with video.

Time Saving Tips

Now that you have the basic information needed to get started, here are a few tips you can use to save time. 

• Cook/chop staple ingredients ahead of time for mix-and-match bowls.
• Use tools like your Instant Pot, Inspiralizer, Instant Air Fryer and more to make prepping and cooking quick and easy.  
• Use your Instant Pot or Slow Cooker to cook up a bunch of beef, chicken, eggs in bulk to use for other recipes later.
• Cook up a big batch of bulk meals like lasagna or a chicken pasta bake and freeze it in individual-sized portions in foil containers. This makes it easy to take one out of the freezer and bake in the oven after work.
• Assemble ingredients into plastic freezer bags, then defrost when you're ready to cook and throw in the slow cooker.
• Pick a day to cut up veggies and assemble greens in containers for easy access later.
• Buy pre-chopped or pre-spiralized veggies from the store so it's easy to throw these veggies in different meal prep bowls or stir fries later on.
• Create a refrigerator/freezer/pantry checklist that helps you take stock of what you already have on hand at home to reduce food waste.
• Sheet pan and one pot meals are the best way to cook in bulk so that you have a ton of food leftover for lunches and dinners, and since it all comes together on or in one dish, you don't have much clean up either. Plan to use dinner leftovers for lunch.
• Create a checklist that helps your audience keep healthy ingredients on hand (like sauces, vinegars, oils, spices, condiments, flours, etc.) so that when they are doing meal prep for the week, they will have everything needed on hand.

How to Earn From Your Cooking Business

1. Equipment and Tools

This business doesn't require a large investment of cash to get started.  Use equipment you have on hand like your phone, tablet, or laptop (for videos and social media) with cookware, basic kitchen tools, and cutting utensils.

Choose a well lit location like a kitchen counter or table to make videos and take pictures of your creations.  

Read our article on how to set up a YouTube Channel, and start building your audience as soon as possible. Get started by filming yourself making your favorite meals.

You can also create video reviews of your favorite tools and resources, and incorporate your videos into blog posts that you share on social media.  

Your blog posts can include recipe cards and grocery lists that you can share with your audience. Download the free Zip Recipes WordPress plugin to incorporate recipe cards into your posts. 

To earn from your business use a combination of these methods as well as those described below.

Check out our tutorial on setting up an email list using an autoresponder from your email marketing provider of choice. Start collecting emails to build an audience of raving fans and loyal customers.

2. Get Paid for Your Recommendations

That includes ingredients, stores (national or wholesale chains if you use them), equipment, utensils and don't forget the equipment and resources you use to run your business.

Once you have chosen a platform (a blog, YouTube channel or both) and you have it set up, start applying to become an affiliate of well known brands in your niche to earn even more from your business. To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out our other articles that cover the topic. 

3. Create Courses and Get Paid for Your Knowledge

Thrive Suite is one of those platforms that you can use to create courses as well as landing pages, sales pages, courses and products that you can sell for profit.

Take a look at one of our demonstration videos that shows you how to not only have a great looking site, but one that helps you grow your business. 

The plugin that specifically allows you to create courses is called Thrive Apprentice. 

Thrive Suite is an all in one sales and marketing tool for any business you decide to start. It's the tool we used to build this website. 

4. Create a Recipe Book and Publish It on Amazon

Amazon is one of the largest retail stores on the planet, and they have a program that will allow you to sell your products on their marketplace. 

They also have Amazon KDP that will allow you to create and sell books, including eBooks, workbooks and puzzlebooks to their massive audience.  Check out their library of books on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

You can also sell your cookbooks on your own website. 

5. Create and Sell Apparel and Printables

Use your organizational skills to create meal plan templates, worksheets, labels and more that will show your audience how to easily create meals for their families. Those plans can be sold, given away for free or a combination of both.

Using tools like Canva to create digital products makes it easy to create products you can sell on your blog, Etsy shop or Shopify store and include in your meal prep packages.

Create items that are helpful for your audience and your helpful tools will enable your business to grow.  

As a business owner you can sell tees, sweatshirts, caps, mugs, and more from your online store using a service called Printful. 

If you use WordPress for example to build your blog, you can get the Printful plugin and add it to your site. When you sell an item, the sale will automatically be sent from your blog directly to Printful where they will process it and send it to your customer. 

You will get a portion of the sale from each item sold, and you don't have to worry about stocking inventory or shipping products to your customers. Printable handles it all for you!

6. Create Meal Kits 

You can take your cooking and meal prep business to a new level by selling meal prepped kits that you deliver to your local community. 

One word of caution... Be aware that when you start selling food directly to consumers, you open yourself up to liability. So be sure to consult an attorney regarding the laws, and get the appropriate licenses that apply in your state for selling food to the public. Be sure to insure your business to protect your interests. 

If you're looking for a quick and easier way to sell food products, consider making subscription boxes. CreateJoy is a company that will allow you to sell subscription boxes on their platform.

Wrapping Up

The sky is the limit when it comes to starting a cooking and meal prep side hustle. The only limit is your creativity and the amount of time you have to devote to building a growing your business. Consider taking our blogging course and our articles that show you how to start a YouTube channel.