Bringing Profits To The Table

Fort Worth's Super Suppers leads the booming industry

FORT WORTH, TX (Saturday, October 28, 2006) - It's called meal prep. At nearly 1,000 locations around the country, would-be cooks can prepare family-style meals from ingredients that are already washed, chopped and laid out assembly-line style.

The finished recipes are boxed, brought home and frozen, and can be heated up and put on the table before a kid can get hungry enough to start whining, "What's for dinner?"

Bill and Judie Byrd, the Fort Worth couple who founded Super Suppers and turned it into the largest meal-prep franchise in the country, have watched the industry grow by more than 700 percent in three years. Now they want to make sure the business doesn't go the way of Dutch tulips or Silicon Valley dot-com start-ups.

"It's like the gold rush -- it's been too easy," said Bill Byrd, 63, a food-industry veteran who runs the business side of Super Suppers while his wife, who has taught cooking for 17 years, develops and tests an ever-changing menu for the franchise. "But there's fairly significant competition now, and we want to be the best."

To that end, Super Suppers had its first convention Friday, inviting more than 200 franchisees to the Renaissance Worthington Hotel in downtown Fort Worth. Sharing recipes and cooking techniques were part of the event, but the primary purpose was to talk business, with sessions on how to market the brand, manage operations and stay competitive in a field that has started to show casualties.

According to the Easy Meal Prep Association, which tracks statistics for the burgeoning industry and provides consultation to franchisees, 17 meal-prep locations have closed after a brief run.

The closings represent a small percentage for an industry that had 173 storefronts at the beginning of 2005 and 561 at the end of the year. The industry is expected to finish 2006 with 1,100.

Bert Vermeulen, who founded the Easy Meal Prep Association, expects outlets to more than double by the end of 2008.

Industry revenue is piling up, too, jumping from $36 million in 2004 to an estimated $270 million this year, according to Vermeulen's group. But with an influx of inexperienced managers and entrepreneurs chasing the business, training is becoming increasingly important.

"In the franchising business, they say there's two things that went wrong if it doesn't make it -- either location or management. Most of the time I'd say it's management," Bill Byrd said.

Meal-prep franchises are relatively easy and inexpensive to start.

The Byrds estimate that a Super Supper franchise requires about $150,000 upfront, including a $35,000 franchise fee payable to Super Suppers, about $30,000 for equipment and $5,000 for grand opening events, along with funds for renovating the storefront -- which can run as high as $40,000 depending on the property lease -- and money to set aside "in case the business doesn't get moving right away," Bill Byrd said.

Start-up fees for fast-food franchises typically range from $180,000 to as high as $3 million, according to the International Franchise Association trade group.

Of the top 10 meal-prep franchises, not one was around five years ago. Dream Dinners, the biggest franchise after Super Suppers, was founded in Snohomish, Wash., in 2002 by two working mothers. Super Suppers, Dinner by Design, Let's Dish, Meal Makers and My Girlfriend's Kitchen started in 2003, and several more competitors have cropped up since then.

Super Suppers has 270 franchises in 40 states. About 190 are in operation. The rest are in various stages of development, which typically takes four to six months from the time of purchase to opening for business, Bill Byrd said.

All new franchisees are brought to Fort Worth for a week of training, which includes sessions on developing a business plan, building the brand and time management.

"We're finding a lot of people just have a real interest in helping people and getting families around the dinner table. But a lot of them don't have any business skills at all, so we really have to work with them," Bill Byrd said.

Terri Jeanne Tolson was a Super Suppers customer in Grapevine when she lived in North Texas. When her family moved to College Station, she opened a Super Suppers franchise there.

Competition is relatively lax in College Station, where Tolson's chief rival is a shop that supplies customers with ingredients and recipes that can be assembled and prepared at home.

"We're a smaller town, but I know there are a lot of different meal-prep companies out there now," Tolson said. "I think the more awareness people have about what meal prep is all about, the better it is for all of us."

Tolson came to Fort Worth for the two-day Super Suppers convention, which offered panels including Keep It Super Simple, a session about operations; and Kick It Up a Notch, about marketing. Other sessions included a primer on holiday meals.

Most of the year, Super Suppers offers about a dozen menus a month, each with four chicken dishes, three beef dishes, two pork recipes, two seafood recipes and one vegetarian selection.

"Everything has to be tested; every recipe has to be able to be frozen and then defrosted and cooked," said Super Suppers food chief Judie Byrd, 59, who finds inspiration for new recipes from magazines, friends and traveling. "I've been married for 41-plus years and raised three kids, so I have a lot of cooking experience to draw from."

The Super Suppers recipes are tested in the kitchen at the Culinary School of Fort Worth, which the Byrds run from the second story of a shopping center on Camp Bowie Boulevard.

A Super Suppers shop typically hosts about nine sessions a week, with daytime and evening options, and has 12 to 16 customers at a time, Judie Byrd said. The shop also caters to private parties and to walk-ins who may want to stop by on the way home from work to assemble a single meal. Customers can call ahead and have meals assembled for them.

Each outlet offers a schedule for walk-ins, regular sessions and special sessions requiring registration. Prices can vary by location, but most charge about $216 for 12 entrees serving six people each, or $114 for six entrees. That works out to about $3 a serving.

Demand for meal-prep shops has been fueled by time-strapped families that want to sit at the dinner table together and enjoy something other than burgers, a pizza or a bucket of fried chicken. The challenge now is keeping the idea profitable.

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