Outsourcing homecooked meals

~ Local businesses offer faster ways to prepare a home-cooked meal

For anyone who has ever been stuck in a grocery store for two hours, here's good news:

A few local women not only understand your pain, they've decided to do something about it.

Across the country, time-saving meal trends are popping up like bagels in a toaster.

In Southeast Missouri, the trends have taken the form of businesses like Meals in Thyme, which provides "meal facilitation and preparation" for busy parents and Thrifty Meals, an Internet-based service that provides customers with weekly menus and aisle-by-aisle shopping lists for local grocery stores.

"If I go to the grocery store I can spend two hours just buying ingredients, then I have to go home and prepare the food and then there's the mess to clean up," said Cindy Berry of Cape Girardeau, one of the co-owners of Meals in Thyme. "The beauty of doing it our way is you use all fresh ingredient and fresh spices."

Meals in Thyme offers a rotating monthly menu of entrees to choose from, as well as a dessert and breakfast entree selection.

"With frozen entrees, you buy food hoping it will taste all right and your family will like it," said Berry. "Our way encourages families to try new things, broaden their palate."

In about two hours, customers can prepare 12 entrees.

Customers assemble the meals at the store, then freeze the food at home until they're ready to prepare it. Berry said there are social benefits to the system.

First, groups of women can come in and have meal preparation "parties."

"You can get a group of women together and it's a social time, like girls' night out, but yet when they leave they've been productive," said Berry.

Also, having the meals prepared before hand frees up the family cook's time.

"By freeing up the cook, usually the mother, it allows her to spend more quality time with her family at the table," Berry said.

Saving time is also the central element behind www.thriftymeals.com, which was started by former Cape Girardeau resident Paula Carmichael Burnette and Lanaye Burnette, who both live in St. Louis now.

The two women began operating the Internet service after discovering that preparation is the key to balanced meals.

The site offers customers a meal-planning service based on food that is on sale at grocery stores in the St. Louis and Southeast Missouri areas. Customers choose a grocery store then receive a weekly menu via e-mail as well as an aisle-by-aisle shopping list.

The owners claim the service can cut down time spent in the grocery store by 50 percent.

"We found it was really stressful going grocery shopping, figuring out meals for the whole week," said Carmichael. "People are just so busy they don't have time to plan menus."

So she and sister-in-law LaNaye Burnette joined together to form thriftymeals.com about a month ago.

They have several different menus each week, based on sale items at stores such as Schnucks. There's also an "anywhere" menu plan for places like Wal-Mart.

"The idea is quick and easy meals as well as making them as healthy as possible, while still utilizing the week's sale items," said Carmichael. "It's just something for really busy people."