There are a lot of things that separate a personal chef from other kinds of chefs.

Personal Chefs vs Other Types of Chefs

Restaurant chefs work nights and personal chefs work days.

Private chefs work for one client. Personal chefs have multiple clients.

Restaurant chefs cook what the owner tells them to. Personal chefs define their own specialty and niche.

Private chefs just cook for their client family. Personal chefs can offer a multitude of services.

And one of those services that personal chefs officer is much more powerful than the rest.

And personal chefs are the only ones that offer it!

Know what it is?

It’s regularly scheduled personal chef services.

Know exactly what it is and how to do it?

No worries that’s what I’m talking about today!

If you’ve been with me here for any amount of time you’ve heard me wax poetic about regularly scheduled personal chef services here.

Regularly scheduled personal chef services are the most powerful service you can offer in your business.

If you’re new though you might not be familiar with them, so I wanted to give a comprehensive explanation of what they are.

Personal chefs can cater, and personal chefs teach cooking classes, but the foundation of a personal chef is “personal chef services”.

Clear as mud right?

Personal chef services are when you are preparing a weeks’ worth (or however many, we’ll get to that in a minute) of dinners for a client, week after week.

These regularly scheduled personal chef services can be anything from twice a week to once a month or even less frequent. The point is they are recurring unlike one off cooking classes or catering jobs.

To clarify this more I frequently call them ‘regularly scheduled personal chef services’ or RSPCS.

Some personal chefs have started calling this service meal prep. This can get confusing because a lot of people think of meal prep as a service that preps the ingredients for you like Blue Apron. To keep it clear I stick with “personal chef services” (PCS) or “regularly scheduled personal chef services” (RSPCS).

The #1 Service: Classic Personal Chef Service – 5×4

A basic place to start is what’s referred to as the 5X4. This means 5 entrees with 4 servings of each entree.

This is the best balance of profit for you and value for your client.

So, if it’s a couple with two young kids this is almost always a great fit. It gives them most of their dinners for the week because they’ll probably eat out a couple times or do something else for dinner (popcorn or cold cereal anyone? Come on we’ve all been there ha ha). You would package the entrees family style with each entree in one container.

If you have a couple without kids this 5 x 4 service can still be a good fit. You would still cook 5 entrees and 4 servings of each one, but you would package each entree in 2 containers, each having 2 servings. They would probably freeze half of them. Altogether they would have 10 nights of dinners or almost 2 weeks allowing for eating out etc. It’s possible if they’re eating them for lunch too, they might go through them faster.

For an individual, you would make the same 5 entrees with 4 servings of each, you would just package them individually. They would have 20 nights of dinners. Basically 3 weeks, but usually they last the month.

Again, the 5 entrée 4 serving service is a great balance of profit for you and value for the client.

In Conclusion

Now the number 1 personal chef service is the classic 5×4 service and that’s a great place to start but yes, people will need different things. You may have a couple who wants only three entrees, or less servings of each entrée. You might have a client who needs more servings because they have a large family, or they want to freeze some to get more value out of one service.

After you dial in your niche and pricing for a classic service, you can confidently move on to pricing other services.