When my dad and I started Chefs For Seniors back in 2013, we had a pretty simple idea: help seniors stay independent and eat better by sending a personal chef into their home to prepare meals.
But over the past 13 years, Chefs For Seniors has grown from a small local business in Madison, Wisconsin, into a nationwide franchise with more than 100 locations. Along the way, we’ve served thousands of clients and learned a lot about what people really value about having a personal chef.
And for years, we kept hearing some version of the same question:
“Do you do this for people who aren’t seniors?”
We’d hear it from our clients’ adult children, friends of clients, referral partners, and even our own franchise owners. We always took it as a compliment, but Chefs For Seniors was built specifically for older adults, and we never wanted to lose sight of that, even though we’ve serviced many of those younger families.
Eventually, though, it became pretty obvious that there was an opportunity to take what we’d built and offer it to a completely different group of people.
That’s where Chefs For Families came from.
Chefs for Families co-founders Nathan & Barrett Allman
The Way We Eat Has Changed
My wife and I have two young kids (3 and 6 months), so I understand the problem we’re trying to solve with Chefs For Families on a much more personal level now.
Between work, kids, activities, errands, and everything else that fills up the week, figuring out what you’re going to eat every night can become a surprisingly big source of stress, even for someone like myself who can get out of my own way in the kitchen.
With a meal kit, you still have to cook. With takeout, you’re eating restaurant food multiple nights a week. And with most prepared meal delivery services, you’re choosing meals made somewhere else and shipped to your house. We thought there was room for something different.
A Personal Chef, Without The Luxury Price
One of the things we’ve learned running Chefs For Seniors is that a lot of people still think having a personal chef is something reserved for celebrities or extremely wealthy households. But it doesn’t have to be.
The Chefs For Families model is pretty straightforward. A chef comes to your home, shops for your groceries, prepares customized meals in your own kitchen, packages everything in your refrigerator, cleans up, and leaves. Usually the chef is in the home for ~3 hours.
You get homemade, healthy food for the week without spending your Sunday meal prepping or figuring out dinner every night.
Building on What We’ve Learned
Chefs For Families is a new brand, but we’re not starting from zero.
We’ve spent 13 years figuring out how to deliver an in-home personal chef service at scale. We’ve developed menus, training, food-safety standards, technology, and a nationwide network of franchise owners and chefs.
Creating Chefs For Families gave us an opportunity to take that experience and apply it to a new audience without changing what makes Chefs For Seniors special.
I’m excited about where it goes from here.
We started Chefs For Seniors because we believed a personal chef could make someone’s life a little easier.
Thirteen years later, we still believe that. We just realized seniors aren’t the only ones who could use a little help with dinner.
– Nathan Allman, Co-Founder