Food Matters

Do you believe you are what you eat? We've been hearing it for years but more of us are taking it to heart. You may just want to check out what top Nutritionists and food Educators are saying in the new film Food Matters.

Food Matters TV

It's worth noting most our clients place nutritional and ingredient quality far above fast food chains. Quality ingredients, organics, local produce are becoming more prominent offerings for Meal Assembly Kitchens. So if food matters to you skip the frozen section and check with your local Meal Assembly Kitchen. They may just be the ticket to the convenience and healthy choice you have been looking for!

EATS thinks that this sounds like a great step toward healthy eating and health care, but before you undertake any new diet regimen be sure to run it by your Doctor.

Labels: diabeties, fast food, food matters, organics, raw food diet

Well it's been a busy Spring for us! Working with new customers, adding exciting features to our industry leading meal assembly software, and looking forward to sharing them with our clients!

EATS is swiftly becoming an industry standard known for user experience and functionality, and we don't plan to stop there! Read on to learn more about what's in store this Summer...

Highlights:

- New and Improved POS
- Meal Assembly goes Mobile

New & Improved POS:

A fully integrated, web based POS (Point Of Sale) system is now part of the EATS solution!
Key features and benefits of the EATS POS:

- Ensures integration of all sales, orders and customer data. No more consolidation - headaches
and sales analysis made easy!

- Fully integrated with EATS, our POS seamlessly manages your orders whether they are made
online or in store!

- Designed for your business. Why pay for features you'll never use?

- EATS compatibility with card swipers, receipt printers, and bar code scanners lets you work
more efficiently so you can focus on your customers.

... and more!

Improved online ordering:

The meal assembly industry's reliance on ecommerce means that it's critical to have a solution that works the way customers have come to expect and understand. We've been working hard to add some breakthrough features to EATS to make it that solution.

The EATS shopping experience:

EATS provides customers with a quick and easy ecommerce experience. Customers can simply begin ordering without signing up or logging in by using the 'Get Started' button on the home page or by selecting the Menu. Clearly labeled buttons and accessible instructions guide customers through the ordering process, making online purchasing smooth and intuitive.


Featured EATS customer:


Featured client: Cena

Tami and Bruce Badinger founded Cena only four years ago, and have grown to over 25 franchises around the US and Canada. With a unique approach of offering not only delicious meals but a full wine shop, baked goods and sides, Cena is distinguishing itself from the competition.

EATS News:

Prep'n Time takes Meal Prep on the road!

Many Meal Prep businesses are offering delivery these days, but Prep'n Time has taken the concept in a whole new direction by offering mobile services to the community. Well done and good luck Karen and Michael!

Labels: cena, meal prep, prep in time, summer

Super Suppers was featured on QVC yesterday. Company founder Judie Byrd gave an excellent appearance to promote the new cookbook she has published.

According to the site, the cookbook is

(l)oaded with 180 family-friendly, easy-to-prepare entrees, sides, appetizers, desserts, and more, Super Suppers Cookbook helps you get a delicious meal on the table in minutes. It also includes plan ahead and freeze ahead tips, as well as tricks to trim time, cut steps, and boost flavor.

You can watch the segment here. While you are there, you should pick up one of the cookbooks while they are available. If it is no longer available through QVC, you can always pick one up at amazon

Check out Judie's other cookbooks available for purchase on Judie' personal website.

Labels: cookbook, meal prep, recipes, super suppers

The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips

Food has an agenda. It wants you to eat it, and it wants you to eat it now.

If you dilly-dally around Food, trying to photograph it instead of eating it, its defense mechanism kicks in. It immediately looks terrible in pictures, forcing you to give up, put down the camera, and eat the Food. Natural selection at work.

The time has come to subvert Food's Evil Agenda. Read our tips, take up your cameras, and join the glorious food photography revolution!

The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips

1: Setting
Choose a setting that enhances, but doesn't distract from your food. Pick a simple, plain background or tablecloth.

Use plates whose color contrasts with or harmonizes with your food, but not ones that are the same color.

Before you start shooting, make sure there isn't any distracting clutter in the background of the shot (stray people, silverware, whatever). Using a wider aperture to blur the background will help.

2: Light
Use natural light whenever you can. The ideal set-up is a next to a large window, with a white curtain to diffuse the light.

If you can't get natural light, don't be tempted to use your flash. Flash photography is too harsh for food's delicate sensibilities. It flattens everything out and makes for unappealing shiny spots.

3: Color Balance
Especially in situations where natural light is unavailable, your photos can have a yellow or blue cast that makes food look terrible (see the blue bacon pictured right). Use the white balance setting on your camera, or adjust the color digitally later on.

4: Don't Move
In low-light situations like restaurants and kitchens, long exposures will register any camera movement as blur. Use a tripod whenever possible. If you don't have one, try resting your camera on a water glass or the back of a chair. Or make yourself a string tripod.

5: Shoot A Lot
Take lots of pictures. Move around the food and see what angle looks best: down low to see the food head-on? Up high to take in the geometry of the presentation?

6: Zoom In
Get in as close as you can. Use the macro setting on your camera if it has one. Fill the frame with the food, so the viewer can almost taste it.

7: Preparation
Don't forget to take pictures of the process. Sometimes making the food (chopping, cooking) can be as interesting as the final product.

8: Be Quick
Work quickly. The faster you take pictures of the food, the fresher it will look. Cold, congealed meat and wilted salads just don't look good.

Use an empty plate to help you set up your shot before the food is ready. At the last minute, slip in the real plate of food.

9: Details
The devil is in the details. Check the edges of your plates and glasses for stray food, and wipe away any smudges. Use sauces and garnishes to add color to drab shots (i.e. adding a lemon wedge to iced tea).

10: Don't Shoot
Some things will just never look delicious, no matter how hard you try.

Meals that are all the same color and brown sauces are best left alone. And tasty though they may be, we defy you to make a haggis look good.

Full article with pictures:

http://photojojo.com/content/tips/food-photography-tips/

Labels: food, meal, photography, prep

What's New in Websites and Software for Meal Prep Businesses
The capabilities of the software for running meal prep businesses continues to improve. The following are features and innovations for you to know about if you are investigating what's next for your website and software.

• Professional-looking home page. It's important to have a great looking store and it is also important that your web storefront looks professional. This home page needs to be aesthetically pleasing, relevant to your business, informational, and simple. If you get the home page looking correct, then a lot of the rest of your website will fall into place.

• Pricing models and flexibility. An increasing number of meal prep businesses are moving to single item or "a la carte" pricing instead of bundled pricing. This makes it easier to ensure that you can provide both lower cost dishes and ones that require higher-cost ingredients. A la carte pricing is also better for stores that do a lot of retail sales (pick up, grab n go, and take n bake). We have recently been seeing more and more a la carte pricing systems that give customers the choice of ordering multiple sizes of entrees in the same order.

• Images of the food. The adage in the restaurant industry is that if you have photo of a dish, it will sell better. An increasing number of meal prep stores are adding images to their website for the same reason. In some cases, the the only image is of the featured dish of the month on the home page. Others have images of some, but not all of the dishes. An increasing number of stores provide a picture of each dish as part of their system. Professional looking food photos have the most impact. If your budget is constrained and plan to take the photos yourself, we recommend that you look at the sites that have high quality photos and see what you can learn from these images to get the right lighting and composition for your food to look as enticing as possible.

• POS (Point of Sales systems). This is currently a big area of development in the meal prep industry. POS + internet integration is a complex problem with many possible solutions. The meal prep industry started with software that was optimized for web-based transactions. The pizza and other parts of the restaurant industry started with systems that were designed for phone-in and in-store orders. There is now a major move afoot to integrate these capabilities.

• Customer order analysis, communication, and loyalty. Well designed software for a meal prep business includes tools for understanding customer buying patterns, measuring marketing campaign effectiveness, linking to your email marketing and direct mail programs, and tracking and managing your loyalty and referral programs.

• Search engine optimization. It is important that your store and signage are visible. Similarly, it is important that that your website can be found by your target customers. Making sure that you have the right tags and content on your web pages can make a big difference. Many software suppliers can help you with this or can recommend someone that can provide this service.

Not all of these capabilities need to be in one software product that you purchase. Many meal prep businesses have implemented successful systems with separate suppliers for the front end website, the ordering system, the POS, and the email marketing function. The key is to ensure that there is one central party (typically your ordering system software supplier) that takes responsibility for ensuring that each piece of the system works well with the others.