Working document
The frozen meal label and allergen audit checklist
Run this checklist across one entree before your next production day and you will find out in twenty minutes what an inspector would find in five.
Free resources
Working resources for small freezer meal kitchens
Everything here is built for the same operator: one kitchen, a weekly menu, forty to two hundred family boxes and a delivery van that leaves on a fixed afternoon.
There is very little written for this trade. Restaurant material assumes a dining room and same day service. Meal kit material assumes a national brand with a fulfillment center. Neither describes a kitchen where one person costs the menu on Monday, thaws on Tuesday, cooks Wednesday and Thursday, and drives the route herself on Friday afternoon with the allergy household as the first stop because that box has to stay separate.
So we write for that kitchen. The calculators handle the two numbers that decide the week, the comparisons say plainly which kind of software fits which kind of operator, and the label checklist is the working document we hand to kitchens making the jump from a handful of orders to a real weekly program. Cold Line, our magazine, carries the longer reporting on rules, unit economics and how kitchens like yours actually run.
Free tools
Calculators for a weekly freezer meal kitchen
Two working calculators for the numbers that decide whether a week of family boxes pays: the margin in the box and the pounds you pull for the cook day.
Comparisons
How FreezerFive compares for a weekly freezer meal kitchen
Three honest comparisons covering the software a small meal prep kitchen actually looks at before it hands over a whole season of Sunday production.
Main guide
How do I price a five meal weekly family box so it still clears thirty percent food cost?
It settles what a five entree family box has to cost, from costed recipes and yield loss through packaging, labor per pan and delivery, so the box clears thirty percent food cost.
Magazine
Cold Line
Reporting on the working craft, food safety rules and unit economics of small meal prep and freezer meal kitchens.
About
Who writes all of this
A page about the person behind FreezerFive, the meal prep kitchens whose pick lists, thaw sheets and pan tags shaped it, and how to get a straight answer about your own weekly family box program.
The label checklist is yours either way
Take the calculators, take the allergen audit, run them against your own entrees and never speak to us again if that is the useful outcome. If you would rather see the menu close, the household allergen flags and the route grouping working together on one screen, a demo is the shortest route there. We will ask what you cook and how many boxes leave on a Friday, not how big your customer list is.