How to start a meal prep business

What it costs to start

No credible sourced total for U.S. meal prep startup costs was found, so no range is given. The dominant recurring cost is commissary kitchen time rather than capital equipment: shared commercial kitchens average $20 to $35 an hour nationally ($15 to $25 rural, $40 to $75 in major cities), or $400 to $900 a month for 20-40 hours and $1,800 to $3,500 a month for full-time use, plus application fees of $25 to $100 and required liability insurance of about $400 to $800 a year.

Source: source

What you have to file

Licensing is set by state, county and city, so this is what the category tends to require rather than a list for where you live. The state pages below carry the filing detail for each of the 50.

• Business licence / business registration and EIN
• Sales tax permit
• Retail food establishment or food processing permit from the state or local health department
• Commissary or shared commercial kitchen agreement, cottage food laws do NOT cover meal prep, because all 50 states and D.C. limit cottage food to shelf-stable, non-potentially-hazardous items and exclude refrigerated, meat and seafood products
• Certified food protection manager certificate and food handler cards for staff
• Plan review and routine health inspections
• HACCP plan where required for cook-chill, reduced-oxygen packaging or vacuum sealing
• Nutrition and allergen labelling compliance (FALCPA) on packaged meals
• FDA food facility registration if the operation manufactures, processes, packs or holds food outside the retail food establishment exemption, no fee, renewed biennially between 1 October and 31 December of each even-numbered year
• USDA FSIS grant of inspection if handling meat or poultry beyond the retail exemption ($100,900 meat / $74,200 poultry sold to hotels, restaurants and similar institutions, CY2024)
• Delivery vehicle refrigeration and cold-holding compliance; commercial auto insurance

Source: 1, 2, 3, 4

What the margins look like

No primary source publishes a profit margin for this business. IRS Statistics of Income does not break out a line this specific, and the percentages in wide circulation come from vendor surveys and market research whose samples and methods are not published, so none is quoted here.

Whether demand is growing

Growing

Growing: Grand View Research forecasts a 7.3% CAGR for the U.S. meal kit delivery market from 2026 to 2033, with cook-and-eat kits holding 61.1% share in 2025 and prepared heat-and-eat meals growing faster at 7.9%.

Source: source

How big the market is

The U.S. meal kit and prepared meal delivery market was worth $15.29 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $28.57 billion by 2033; the fully prepared 'heat and eat' segment is the faster-growing half, at a projected 7.9% CAGR versus 7.3% for the market overall (Grand View Research).

Source: source

The part that ends most of them

The legal route in is narrower than founders expect. Because prepared meals are refrigerated, temperature-controlled-for-safety foods, no state's cottage food law lets you make them at home, a commissary or licensed commercial kitchen is mandatory from day one, and the cold chain has to be maintained through delivery. The other frequently cited difficulty, high subscriber churn in meal subscription businesses, is repeated widely but we found no primary study quantifying it for independent operators, so it should be described as an industry observation rather than a statistic.

Source: 1, 2

Before you start

• What it will cost you, since the numbers above are the category and not your version of it
• Sole proprietor, LLC or S corp, what actually differs, with no recommendation
• What your state wants filed, read from the state's own pages
• What you have to sell to break even, which decides whether the margin above matters
• Which way you actually work, if the choice between these is really a choice about you

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