Top Australian chefs’ secret recipes take on Hello Fresh, Marley Spoon

Top restaurateurs in Melbourne and Sydney have thrown their weight behind a new meal kit subscription service that aims to muscle out foreign-owned players Marley Spoon and Hello Fresh by giving customers access to exclusive restaurant recipes and top-quality ingredients.

The chefs behind Melbourne’s Cecconis, Mamasita, Ish, LadyBoy, La Tortilleria and Sydney’s Fei Jai and DOC Pizza are some of the award-winning industry heavyweights that are lending their name to Make-Out Meals. Launched in September 2020, the start-up meal kit service is now delivering to Victoria, NSW and the ACT and is looking to raise up to $1 million through Birchal equity crowd-funding.

I Maccheroni chef & owner Marcello Farioli has partnered with ‘Make-Out Meals’.Credit: James Brickwood

Make-Out Meals founder and CEO Billy Green is not a chef. In fact, he had no prior experience in the hospitality sector. But he felt he spotted a gap in the meal subscription market after being disappointed by meal kit deliveries that he says lacked both flavour and freshness, having discovered mouldy ingredients.

“I was just really underwhelmed. The meals themselves were really bland and tasteless, the produce definitely wasn’t as fresh as they make out. The amount of single-use plastic was shocking, and the customer service was just completely non-existent,” Mr Green told the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“To top it off, I found out none of these companies were even Australian.” Marley Spoon is headquartered in New York and Hello Fresh in Berlin.

Make-Out Meals founder CEO Billy Green hopes to take on Marley Spoon and Hello Fresh by borrowing culinary starpower.

Mr Green’s idea to recreate restaurant meals in diners’ own kitchens sprung at a time when many in the hospitality industry – especially upmarket outfits based in the CBD – were on their knees.

“A lot of the restaurants started to recognise that they really needed to branch out in terms of their revenue streams,” Mr Green said. “It just seemed like a really obvious way to bring a lot of these restaurants and chefs together in a new way that hadn’t been done before.”

Getting top chefs to hear him out was hard work: Mr Green started out by cold-calling restaurants and asking them to supply recipes. Entrecote, Tipico, Fancy Hanks and Bomba were some of the very first to sign on.

Restaurants make commissions based on the recipe. The platform has now collected over 100, though subscribers choose from a selection of nine that is rotated every week.

“These are signature recipes which chefs have spent their whole lives protecting. For the first time, they’re sharing these methods and ingredients in a way that everyone can cook in a quick and healthy format.”

Other than the most obvious pull of being able to prepare restaurant dishes at home, the crucial factor Mr Green hopes will differentiate Make-Out Meals from the incumbents are fresh, premium ingredients.

Make-Out Meals founder CEO Billy Green with Entrecote head chef Timothy Menger. Entrecote’s ‘secret herb butter sauce’ is available to Make-Out Meal customers.

All meal kit ingredients are packed the day before they’re sent to customers. “It means we don’t need to wrap them in plastic to keep them looking nice,” Mr Green said.

The second difference is the ingredients are from restaurants’ very own suppliers. “The produce is really top-shelf,” he said. “That’s what the restaurant expects us to buy … they wanted the quality that we’re giving our customers to reflect the quality that they’re given in their restaurants.”

With a solid line-up of 19 Melbourne restaurants now behind Make-Out Meals, the start-up is branching out to Sydney and has just signed on Zigi’s Wine Bar, De Vine Food and Wine, I Maccheroni, and Foodie del Mar. In Melbourne, Gilson, Coda, Hotel Jesus and Mahjong have just joined the ranks.

The business has 300 active subscribers and has just seen off its best-ever month of $80,000 in revenue. Across the 2022 financial year, Mr Green is hoping to turn over $700,000.

Though lockdowns have become a thing of the past and consumers are dining out again, Mr Green said subscription numbers have stayed steady.

“It’s not about taking business away from the restaurant,” he said. “It’s about really complementing them and making sure they’re getting exposed to customers more than just one night a week they might go out to a restaurant.”

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