How Much is it to Hire a Chef?

Hiring a private chef to meal prep for you could save a couple on minimum wage £1,500 a year! There, we’ve got the punch line out the way and no, this isn’t click bait, this is based on the practical reality for many of us.

To begin, there are a lot of reasons why someone may consider hiring a private chef and none of those are because they’re looking to be better off financially, but it should be. At Meals, we receive calls each day from anyone from professional athletes to working parents and individuals with severe allergies, explaining that they are considering booking a personal chef and the main two reasons are:

‘to save time’ & ‘to feel better’

These are of course two very important categories that almost everyone fits into. We could all do with more time to focus on either our work, our family or our pleasures and we could all benefit from being provided with the exact nutritional requirements we as an individual need based on who we are and what we do. If we did this we would all feel better and perform better.

In almost all cases, anyone considering a private chef for these reasons do so because traditional meal prep services don’t provide the quality or the customisation needed and so paying £7-£8 for a mass produced dish, that tastes average, with poor quality ingredients, that isn’t tailored to you and has a protein portion size not suitable for a child becomes hard to stomach – excuse the pun…

In any case, you end up with this light bulb moment, imagining having your own chef who prepared all your meals for you each week? You then find yourself crawling the internet fully expecting to come to the conclusion that you can afford it. Well let’s find out why you’d be wrong about that.

What does it cost to hire a chef for meal prep?

Lets take the basic example of a couple who just want breakfast and 2 meals a day each, lunch and dinner, for 5 days a week. That is a total of 25 meals a week.

Cost of the Chefs Time

This is going to take a Meals chef just under 5.5 hours to do the shopping, come to your home and prep and cook up the meals and then do a clean down afterwards.

The cost of the chefs time will be around £210.00.

Cost of the Ingredients

On average, for 20 meals, the cost of ingredients will be about £95.00.

Of course this will depend on the meals you select, portion sizes and where the chef shops, but this is a very good estimate for the average person using the Meals platform.

Total Annual Cost for a Chef: £15,860

So for 2 people to have all their main meals taken care of during the week you are looking at a cost of £305.00 or just over £150 per person.

So that is £15,860 a year for a couple if they don’t take any holidays or pause the service for any time.

The True Cost

What would a couple normally spend on their main meals each week? Let’s take a typical example of a working couple who have lunch out at work then cook for themselves in the evening and get one take out a week.

Food Cost

From our experience, it would be unlikely that a couple would spend less than £100 a week on food when you consider snacks and all the items you pick up in the shop that you shouldn’t including the vegetables you throw away at the end of the week. But lets call it evens, as a chef doing the shopping for you, sticking to the meal plan and avoiding waste will be an effective way of reducing your shopping spend.

Annual Shopping Cost: £4,940

In addition to this, a quick survey around the office in Bristol and the team indicated they normally spend around £10 at lunch either at a cafe or going to the shops. That’s £20 per day for a couple or £100 per week.

Annual Lunch Cost: £5,200

Then one takeaway a week for 2 people comes in at a conservative £30.00.

Annual Takeaway Cost: £1,560

Total Annual Food Cost: £11,700

Time Cost

Now for the important part and this will resonate more easily with anyone who runs their own business or bills hourly for their time, but it should be considered deeply by all. No matter who you are, your time has a value and there is nothing more important than your time as you only get a set amount of it.

But for argument sake, the minimum wage in the UK is approximately £11.50. Therefore, lets value any time you spend around organising your food at minimum wage.

Time Shopping

By the time you’ve made a list, travelled to the shops and put it all away, we estimate you’ll spend 2 hours a week shopping. That is around 100 hours a year or a cost of £1200.00.

Time Preparing Food

Included in this is time to make breakfast (15 minutes per couple) and time to go and source your lunch (15 minutes per person, 30 minutes per couple) and cooking time each evening at 45 minutes per couple (at least!). So that is a total of 1.5 hours per day or 7.5 hours per week or 390 hours a year. Or a cost of £4,485 a year.

True Cost Summary

So in summary, a couple might spend around 500 hours a year or, if we call a day 16 usable hours, 31 days a year… A WHOLE MONTH organising their breakfast, lunch and dinner Monday to Friday.

Even if we just compare the price of a personal chef (£15,860) versus the cost you’d spend on food anyway (£11,700), would you not pay £4000 for you and your partner to have a whole extra month to do whatever you wanted?

But if you consider being paid just minimum wage for your time, the cost of breakfast, lunch and dinner Monday to Friday, for a couple who don’t have a private chef, stands at £17,385.

So in summary, you could strongly argue that hiring a private chef to meal prep for you each week could save you at least £1500 a year. At the very least, it could give you a month of additional time each year to invest in something else other than preparing meals.

Finally, not only is it cost effective but the quality of meals you will be receiving will most certainly be better, as a professional chef is making them and those meals will be tailored to you. So, the benefits go far beyond the monetary value of the meals themselves but extend into your health, wellbeing and the personal time you have available to you.

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