On paper it sounded financially delicious. When asked, moms said having a family dinner was important. They said they really, truly wanted to feed their families healthy, delicious affordable meals but they couldn’t because they just didn't have the time, what with work, soccer,and traffic jams.

Enter the meal assembly business – a concept to relieve moms of their meal guilt and at the same time provide families with delicious, healthy affordable meals. Brilliant!

How could it be anything but a profitable business venture?

Forget about those frozen meals we purchased at Trader Joe’s and Costco’s over sized chicken pot pie, the meal assembly evangelists believed that meal assembly was a paradigm shifting trend the likes of which the kitchen hasn’t seen since the introduction of the microwave.

And, for a while it looked like they may have been right. In cities throughout the country, meal assembly franchises opened. Depending on where you live.. you may have seen them. As of July 1, 2008 there were 385 meal prep companies -- with 1176 outlets.

Yet that is a far cry from the number proponents envisioned just a few short years ago. It turns out the that the industry seemed to peak in 2006. Some of the industries big wigs originally projefted there would be 3000 meal prep outlets by 2010. They've now readjusted those projections to 1,935. Meal Assembly Watch is skeptical.

Meal assembly has been on the decline for over a year now and that was before the cost of ingredients nearly doubled and the economy nose dived. But yet somehow, meal assembly will once again show explosive growth and open another 800 stores (nearly two a day) in a little over a year? Or let’s say we go until the end of 2010 to try and hit this number, it’s still one store opening just about every day from now until December 2010 (365 days x 2 years=730 stores). But these new figures don’t take into account any of the stores that are currently in the process of closing or will close by the end of this year. Once again I ask how is this forecast even remotely possible? Is there any sense of reality to that statement? People are walking away in droves from this business and sadly many of them are carrying $250k in debt with them. I really would like to know under what set of conditions this forecast will ever come to fruition.

Working under the premise that preparing meals for your family is both therapeutic and the right thing to do, the original meal assembly formula had moms –encouraged to come with friends so they could chat, giggle and cheer each other on through the process –spend around two hours preparing a week’s worth of family meals.

In many places this was by appointment only. In other words you couldn't just drop in and prep,you had to schedule it into your blackberry.

But instead of being a kitchen changing trend, meal assembly appears to be more about novelty and less about sustainability. Growing up my family used to go to Northern New Jersey every summer to visit my cousins. One year we went to a trampoline park – I had never seen anything like it and for that entire visit all I wanted to do was go back to the trampoline and jump to my hearts content.

Every day of that visit we begged and pleaded to go back to the trampoline spark just one more time. They told us “ next year.” The next summer , it was gone.
Like that trampoline park, It seems that no one was actually jumping up and down for the opportunity to spend hours preparing meals in someone else's kitchen.

Many tried meal assembly once or twice. I did. Actually, I didn’t go to the full blown assembly plant. Instead, I went to the grab and go satellite facility where my only task was to decide what I wanted to eat and then take the frozen version of the meal off the shelf.
It was kind of like going to the grocery store. If I remember correctly the food was okay but it wasn't fabulous.

In explaining the rise and fall of the meal assembly sector, the Meal Assembly Watch suggests,

Meal assembly doesn’t fit into a consumer’s mindset. And it’s not from a lack of education or media hype, they simply don’t care. Even in perfect locations with perfect demographics it doesn’t work. The ideas of eating together as a family, eating healthier, losing weight, learning to cook, spending time with friends, a girl’s night out, charitable donations, meals for the sick and elderly have all been used as selling points and none of them work! People know about this idea, they just aren’t interested. And what kind of business are you running if people try your product once or twice and then you never hear from them again? Your turnover rate is constant, but the number of people you can reach is finite; not a great business endeavor.

For the hundreds of women entrepreneurs who invested in meal assembly businesses,meal assembly is turning out to be less of a paradigm shift and more of an overcooked business concept.

Today, the meal assembly business has left a bitter taste in entrepreneurs who are left with massive debt and shattered dreams of the entrepreneurial life.
Meal Assembly Watch is currently running a poll to see just how much money franchisees have lost.

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Franchise Pick dished out a bit of satire on the problems facing the industry. In the process, the blog skewered the CEO of one of the country’s main meal assembly franchises… Dream Diners,

Why is the Meal Prep / Meal Assembly Kitchen Franchise Failing? Two words:
GREEDY FRANCHISEES.
That’s right. Moneygrubbing, materialistic franchise owners who don’t care what they’ve got to cook or who they’ve got to feed to get their oven mitts on more of their filthy lucre.
These avaricious entrepreneurs tricked noble companies like Dream Dinners into letting them invest $250,000 to $370,000 under the false pretense of wanting to serve their communities. In actuality, their insidious secret plot all along was to build profitable businesses! In the words of Dream Dinners co-founder Stephanie Allen: “Their bottom line was the dollar.”
In a interview with the Charlotte Observer, Ms. Allen did indeed say tha thte businesses was getting fried because

Q. You’ve had some stores close. What would you attribute that to?
Poor execution. Not having owners whose No. 1 reason for getting into the business was to take care of and serve their communities. Their bottom line was the dollar.

In response to the declining business opportunities with meal assmebly, Dinner by Design unveiled a new business concept last Thursday. In its reincarnation the company will have less to do with meal assembly and more to do with meal delivery ( how much were we paying for a gallon of gas in February?)
Some of the changes include delivering meals to day cares, schools and businesses, as well as take and bake and expanded business hours.

I've heard of this concept before. You call a restaurant and you ask, " Do you deliver?" It's a keeper.

Elana writes about business culture at FunnyBusiness