It sounds like a business that would be at home in Beverly Hills or New York, but Easy Platter, which sends chefs to the homes of its customers, is based in Halifax.
“Basically, we are an on-demand personal chef service, the first of its kind in Canada. How we operate is we connect personal chefs with consumers who really want to have a nutritious and healthy diet customized for them,” said owner Manny Singh.
“It’s like an Airbnb for chefs.”
Easy Platter started operations about six months ago, after considerable research that consisted of speaking to “hundreds of chefs and many, many restaurants, and culinary schools.”
Singh and his partner wanted to create a business outside the space occupied by services that deliver restaurant meals to homes and those that deliver ingredients for customers to cook themselves.
“We are really going after the market segment which gives a lot of options to customers,” he said.
“What that means, for example, is if you’re looking at doing the Paleo diet with less avocado, no peanut, you can’t (do that with other services). This is really customizable and we want to capitalize on the chefs’ availability, especially during the pandemic when restaurants are shutting down.”
Singh sees a day coming when he will employ chefs full time. For now, his roster, which includes chefs from India, Turkey, Brazil and Barbados, as well as Canada, consists of cooks from Halifax restaurants who are moonlighting on their day off.
“The chefs are . . . really dedicated and focused on building their own brand name, rather than building a brand name for a restaurant, for example,” he said.
“Obviously, we want to scale to the level where we could potentially hire them full time.”
That ambition on the part of the chefs is why the service costs $7.75 per meal.
“So, if you subscribe for the weekly service, it’s $77 for 10 meals — five meals prepared for two adults.”
Singh has seen signs that there are both chefs and customers available out there who just need to be connected. When public health recently ordered restaurants to close an hour earlier, his website was flooded with chef’s resumes within hours. And when he took part in a recent marketing event at the Bedford health food store Luminate, he signed up five customers in one day.
Easy Platter is preparing about 50 meals a week, and Singh is about to embark on a marketing campaign to expand the business. He’s also becoming more tech-driven, with the addition of an ingredient calculator on the company’s website.
“During COVID, we’ve had to pivot a little bit because people obviously are not as excited as we’d like for in-home meal prep. So, we’ve started a model where we could have custom-made meals delivered to their home,” he said of his new service with virtually limitless menu options.
“If you don’t want anyone coming into your home, we can have the chefs pick up the groceries, prepare the meals and send you the meals. And you don’t pay a cent more on the groceries so if, for example, Sobeys or Superstore is charging you $94.35, you pay $94.35; we don’t charge any overage on that.”
Singh said that at this point, all the people making the decision to use Easy Platter are women. About 80 per cent of his customers are younger families.
“Some of them are younger parents with one or two kids, basically busy parents who just don’t have the time,” he said.
“We have a few couples in Dartmouth with no kids, but they’re just dedicated to going to the gym, working out. They want to focus on eating healthy food, rather than saying ‘I just came back from the gym, let’s order a pizza.’”
