Dinner to your door

BOULDER — How much would you pay to have a top Boulder chef prepare blackened salmon or rosemary flank steak in your home?

Before you start calculating, factor in the convenience of having their ingredients and instructions delivered so that you could do the cooking. What does that do to your final answer?

If that final answer happens to be $4.99 for the salmon or $6.99 for the steak, you’ve probably already peeked at www.classymeals.com. Boulder entrepreneur Doug Krueger makes chef-designed, inexpensive “healthy, home-cooked meals that don’t take longer than 30 minutes to prepare” available for pickup. For an additional $3.50, they will be delivered to your door.

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Krueger believes “You don’t go to a car parts place and build yourself a car. Why go to a grocery store and build yourself a dinner?”

The concept was born, Krueger says, when he found himself “aghast” after agreeing to help get dinner on the table twice a week. “There’s so much time involved in meal planning, shopping and preparation.,” he marvels, the initial astonishment still obvious in his voice. When the “waves of panic” subsided, he recognized that there were other people in the same boat who would pay to have restaurant-quality dinners at home with minimal effort.

Deciding to focus on healthy dinners that would be easy to prepare, he put his background as an engineer for IBM and Electronic Data Systems to work and first systematized shopping. “How many people,” he asks, “go into King Soopers for ground beef and eggs and end up spending $400 because of all the other stuff they buy? And they still don’t have dinner.”

He then hired top Boulder chefs Bob Simpson, Dan Schindler and Lee Gilmore to design meals and a la carte items. The menus change weekly, and customers can order by chef as well as by item.

After many days of nonstop Web site design, marketing, consultations and constant busyness, www.classymeals.com was born. The sophisticated site shows each dish’s ingredients, price, what’s included with each entree, the cooking skill level and equipment necessary, a list of potential side dishes, dietary restrictions, preparation tips, gift certificates and a newsletter.

“The prices are great,” says Donna Riccardo, who met Krueger at the chamber of commerce.

“And the portions are just right. It’s almost too easy. You just throw things in at the appropriate time, and there you go!”

Krueger, who would not discuss startup costs for the privately held company, plans to franchise it by 2005. With a base of almost 300 single-meal customers established, he anticipates rapid growth once his weekly plan, the Executive Account, takes hold.

“We’re bringing back the idea of the family dinner,” Krueger notes. “Think about the person who gets off work at 5 p.m. and immediately has to get into dinner-preparation mode. That means, probably, shopping as well as making and serving, which necessarily means that kids are going to be hungry before dinner is ready.

ClassyMeals only need to be put together and cooked. We’ve supplied all the pre-measured ingredients and the step-by-step directions to put together a full dinner within a half hour of arriving home.”

The meals meet that criterion, says Jeff Dierks, who with his wife Theo is a Executive Account member. The Dierks, who have “tried just about everything on the menu” appreciate having an “all-stress-removed” meal within 30 minutes twice a week. Says Dierks, “There’s good portion control and the pricing seems fair. And Doug is actively involved; he’s always asking us what we liked and didn’t like, and how the service was.”

“How many people actually figure out how much it costs, per serving, to feed a family dinner?” Krueger asks. “With Classy Meals you get what one of our customers called ‘a more elegant dinner than I’ve had at restaurants.’ And it’s in your own home. And it’s taken 25 minutes.”