Studies have proven that nearly 64 percent of adults spend money dining out once a week, and annually that collectively reaches over 602 billion dollars a year. That becomes oncering when statistics say that cooking food gives people a healthier diet than takeout and restaurant food. The sodium, fat, and calories of takeout is significantly higher than home cooked meals. With all these benefits you wonder, what prevents people from cooking their own meals?
Meals take time, for flavor they take sauteing, they need patience and planning. Personally, after getting home from school or work who has the energy to chop onions, saute the onions and spices? I personally didn’t and i could tell my mom didn’t either, who wants to watch their mom get home from a long day or work, a train ride, and make them cook food for an hour? There had to be a way to cook food faster without compromising the taste or quality, there had to be some solution, some way for me to cook meals with my nonexistent patience. So we tested and tested, me and my sister tried variations of pre prepared spices, frozen onions, already cooked base. The best thing we found was a paste, a paste we called Meal Genie.
What is MealGenie?
It is a precooked sauce, which when mixed and cooked with chicken, lentils, or beans, results in an aromatic and mouth watering food. Its healthy, tastes good, and its princed reasonably. What more could you want? Our paste consists of the few constants of all our meals, like onions, garlic, ginger, and a few spices. These are slow-cooked for 12 hours. Then we add spices, blend it, and then slow cook again for 8 hours. The paste is to be refrigerated until use and only a few spoons of the paste is used each time; along with being vegan, made with all natural ingredients, gluten free, and dairy free.
| Problem | Solved |
| Prep Time | Yes |
| Cooking | Reduced |
| Cleaning | Reduced |
| Healthy | Yes |
| Tastes good | Yes |
| Cost | Reduced |
We even made things simpler by getting rid of other flavors you’d use for custom foods by giving out packets that practically make your food for you. I would just put a packet, chicken, and MealGenie into the Instant Pot and dinner would be done. Imagine knowing that you could tune the flavor to your preferences. The base MealGenie sauce comes with a good flavor and you can add the seasonings and flavors provided to turn the notch up and down.
MealGenie made my life so much easier, food would be ready to eat in 10 minutes flat, it was simple to make that even my 10 year old sister was able to make it. We would make a mass amount of MealGenie and freeze it so we could just put it in a pan and work on top of that. This gave us so much more time to do more and it didn’t limit the options of what we wanted either. After some time of using this paste, friends and family started asking about it, they started asking for MealGenie for their own cooking and how it was made. Soon after this revelation we decided to expand. MealGenie had already helped so many people, and it could help so many more. We started a simple blog first, recipes, what it was, how it helped us. It started to gain attention and Meal Genie was received my more people through our online store. We even went onto kickstarter to see if we received enough funding for branding and mass production. However like every company, it had its losses, and Kickstarter was unable to reach its optimistic goal of 6,000 dollars. Even after we continued to give out more paste and post more recipes for people to see. However around November, juggling school, sports, and a business became slightly difficult so we paused the site for a few months. Even though the side was paused we still received emails for requests, and our family used it almost every day.
MealGenie 