It is 5:30, and you are desperately rummaging through your fridge and cupboards trying to come up with something resembling dinner. The kids have to be at their next activity soon, and you finally give up and announce you’ll be hitting the drive-through again.
Sound familiar?
Busy families know how difficult it can be to put a dinner on the table that doesn’t come out of a box or sack. And in those rare instances you manage to cook a healthy meal, you might find it’s a party of one, as everyone else has sports practice, work or other obligations that prevent them from being home at dinnertime.
Jana Day knows the struggle families face when it comes to providing healthy, inexpensive meals and sitting down together at the dinner table. It was her own experience with these struggles that led her to become a franchise owner of Dream Dinners in Overland Park.
Day grew up around the dinner table. Her mom planned menus ahead of time and cooked dinners for the family each night after coming home from her full-time job. After Day became a mom herself, she found that nightly dinners weren’t always so easy.
“I found that as a young mom, I was failing at dinnertime. I would go to the grocery store, spend hundreds of dollars…and I still could not get dinner on the table,” Day says. “We were eating out three or four nights a week. And when we weren’t eating out, we were eating the same things over and over again.”
Enter Dream Dinners. In 2005, Day and her family relocated from Wichita to open the franchise, after much research and an extensive interview process at the company headquarters in Washington. A decade later, the business is thriving.
The goal of the Dream Team—employees of the company—is to take the frustration out of dinner by providing guests with the ingredients and instructions they need to prepare meals, cutting down shopping time, planning and prep work. In just 60-75 minutes at Dream Dinners, guests assemble around 12 meals to take home and put in the freezer. On busy nights, families can cook these dinners in less than 30 minutes. Day says most families need help getting dinner on the table two to three nights a week, so those 12 meals can cover “emergency nights” for a month.
“We help families grow great kids by getting families back around the dinner table,” Day explains. “By helping families get dinner on the table, it allows them to feel like, ‘I am a rock star!’ and that’s really what we’re about.”
Each month, the company offers 17 entrees with a variety of beef, chicken, pork, seafood, pasta, kid-friendly foods and more. Guests can go online to sign up for a session and choose the meals their family will enjoy, then come in to assemble the meals. Each entrée is priced individually, which allows customers to monitor their budgets. At an average of 400-500 calories per serving, the dishes are healthy and affordable. Some side dishes are available, but Day says home cooks often need the most help coming up with main food ideas.
Around 300 guests visit Dream Dinners each month, and about 30 of those are first-timers. Day says most of her regular customers average four or five visits a year, but some come every month. Not surprisingly, the core demographic of guests at Dream Dinners is families with children at home, but there is a small percentage of empty nesters who are trying to get out of the rut of dining out frequently. Single people—or families of one, as Day calls them—are not uncommon either.
Dream Dinners is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and has some big events planned. Throughout the month of December, Top 10 lists, in which guests share their favorite things about Dream Dinners, will be posted on a wall inside the store. Photos of guests, staff and the business over the years also will be posted on the wall. On the agenda, too, is an open house Dec. 12 that will include samples, drawings and meal giveaways.
Day encourages folks who haven’t visited Dream Dinners: “Try us once. We are not a membership business. We do have an amazing loyalty program and an awesome introductory offer. If you’re not completely satisfied, we will work with you. You have nothing to lose.”
To learn more about Dream Dinners and to sign up for a session, go to DreamDinners.com.
Tisha Foley wishes she had a personal chef, but she does cook spaghetti and tacos well, according to her children. The family of four lives in Belton.