“By the time you get home at 5:30 or 6, how much time do you have to make dinner?” she asked. “It's hard to find time, if you're really busy, to cook something that is healthy, something more than just spaghetti sauce out of the jar.”
And so, when she decided to host a couple of small get-togethers at her home recently, rather than try to do everything herself she looked up Nourish, a new personal chef and meal-planning service offered by Kali MacLaurin.
Across the nation, the popularity of personal chef services is on the rise. The United States Personal Chef Association estimates that the number of families hiring personal chefs has more than doubled in the past five years, to about 90,000.
The increase is being driven mostly by busy professionals who are latching on to the idea as a way to bring their families back to the dinner table, said Candy Wallace, founder and executive director of the 12-year-old American Personal & Private Chef Association in San Diego, Calif.
There's also a growing awareness of the difference between personal and private chefs, said Wallace, who has been a chef for 38 years and recently co-wrote a book called “The Professional Personal Chef: The Business of Doing Business as a Personal Chef.”
Private chefs, she explained, are for wealthy people. They typically work full-time for just one person or family, often as live-in estate managers. Private chefs can make a lot of money, but “they can't complain if they're awakened at 3 in the morning because their clients want a bowl of cereal they don't want to make themselves,” Wallace said.
Personal chefs, on the other hand, cook for multiple clients according to their own schedule, usually during the late morning and afternoon when nobody is home. Often they will spend an entire day at one house making a week's worth of meals that are frozen or refrigerated and then reheated by their clients as needed.
According to Wallace's association, about 9,000 personal chefs were cooking in the United States at last count. But if the industry continues growing at its present rate, the number of personal chefs will swell to 25,000 within the next five years.
It can be a rewarding career path for people who love to cook but have no intention of working at a restaurant, where chefs have to prepare hundreds of meals a night using a pre-set menu, Wallace said. Personal chefs, she said, have a lot more freedom.
MacLaurin's career as a personal chef represents a fusion of her passions for both food and business. A University of Montana graduate with degrees in international business management and Spanish, she got the idea for the business after a hard-working friend - the kind who regularly puts in 80-hour workweeks - asked her if she would cook him a meal.
Having always been handy in the kitchen, MacLaurin decided to get a business license and start building a list of regular customers. Now, she is one of only a handful of personal chefs in Missoula.
Like most personal chefs, she meets with her clients before she starts cooking to quiz them on their culinary likes and dislikes, and to note any special allergies or eating goals.
Her aim, she said, is to provide personalized, health-minded meals to busy professionals and families. Her speciality is nutritious meals made the old-fashioned way, and so she buys organic, locally grown products as much as possible, and even makes her own condiments from scratch.
However, she tries to hold costs down to what the average family in Missoula can afford, she said. The service isn't supposed to be a high-end thing - it's meant for parents who want to spend more time with their children, who don't want to drive, exhausted, to the drive-through one more time.
“I hope my clients can see that as a justifiable cost,” MacLaurin said.
Alan Brown of AB Cooks: A Personal Chef Service said most of his customers are drawn to the service for its convenience. They aren't necessarily interested in super-fancy French cuisine.
“Most people want basic, home-style food that's good quality that they eat at their convenience,” said Brown, who has probably been working as a personal chef in Missoula longer than anyone. He started in 1999, and has built up a regular clientele of seven families.
“Everyone that I'm cooking for now I've been cooking for for years,” he said.
When he first started out, the personal chef business pretty much flew under the radar, he said, but it seems that's no longer the case.
Jim Gray of Kitchen Guy Personal Chef Service, who has been offering his personal chef services for eight years, agreed that demand in western Montana has been on the upswing. A big growth area for him, he noted, has been the expanding number of adults who are working, raising children and also caring for their aging parents.
“There's a misconception that personal chefs are for rich people, and that's not the case at all. Most of my clients are people who are just too busy to cook,” Gray said. “I also have a number of clients who just hate to cook.”
Many of his customers are also looking for more healthful ways to eat, and some request smaller portion sizes. Gray has cooked for people recuperating from severe injuries or illnesses, and for people with celiac disease who cannot digest gluten.
The personal chef service is all about tailoring a meal to an individual's unique needs and preferences, he said.
“If somebody says I hate green beans, I won't ever cook anything for them with green beans,” Gray said.
Waleska Coreano, also known as The Saucy Chef, started working as a personal chef in Missoula about a year ago.
“I've been doing catering and working in restaurants all my life,” she said. “But working in a restaurant is long hours, and this is more direct with the client.”
“I still think that it hasn't caught on in Missoula like it has in the other cities of the United States,” she added. “But I think it will.”
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