ALUMNI PROFILE
Dinner by Design
As a busy mother of three, Julie Duffy, Jour ’90, was fed up with the demands of dinner time.
By Nicole Sweeney
It wasn’t long before she was cooking up plans for something bigger:
Dinner by Design, now one of the nation’s most successful meal preparation franchises.
“I really enjoyed cooking, and I still had a difficult time getting dinner on the table,” says Duffy, who is married to Patrick Duffy, Bus Ad ’90. “Because it’s not just the cooking — it’s the menu planning and the grocery shopping and the prep work and the cleanup.”
Dinner by Design customers prepare 12 meals in just two hours, and then pop them in the refrigerator or freezer until later. Each meal serves four to six people and costs roughly $3 a serving.
Duffy opened her first kitchen in Grayslake, Ill., in 2003. Now, she has nearly 80 locations under contract in 11 states, and she expects to hit 150 locations by the end of next year.
She was the first in the Midwest to jump on this hot trend: Nearly 900 meal assembly centers have sprung up across the country, according to the Easy Meal Prep Association.
|
