Dear Winston

The ingenuity and creativity of marketers never fails to amaze me. Just when you thought you had seen it all, that nothing new could possibly be invented to bring a whole new category into the market, here it is. You won't find it in Australia yet but close your eyes and count to 20 and sure enough it will rapidly appear.

The new invention is - home cooking. Now get this straight, I don't mean cooking at home, or ordering meals to be delivered to the home, that has a pretty sound and established market. No, what I mean is preparing your meals outside for cooking at home. It's called "Meal Assembly Kitchens".

You'll best understand it if I explain how it works: Once every two or three weeks you set aside a couple of hours for cooking and go to your nearby Meal Assembly Kitchen. It's a shop, the franchises have names like Dream Dinners, Dinners Together, and Simply Homemade.

The company has prepared a couple of dozen "recipes of the month" which you select off the web before you go. At the shop all the foods have been prepared. Sauces, marinating, peeling, dicing, cleaning, all the prepping and chopping have been done for you. You put on an apron and hairnet (which might explain why the majority of the customers are women) and you prepare the dishes you have selected.

Gather up the ingredients and put them into a zip-lock bag or baking tray. Take more of the ingredients you like, or less of the ingredients you don't like and customise the dish to your own family's taste - like a bit more garlic? A bit less chilli? There's an on-site cook to advise you and a scullery maid to clean up the benches after you.

Stack up the esky

At the end of the two hours you should have prepared about a dozen meals, with four to six servings each, all neatly packed and labelled and stored in your esky.

When you get home you transfer all the packets into the freezer and then pull out a meal a night as necessary. Just so it doesn't look just a sly variation on frozen dinners, you might boil up a few spuds or some rice, toss a salad or do a side dish for the meal.

Your family gets home-cooked chicken cordon bleu or garlic beef sirloin with mushroom sauce or glazed meatballs with rice, but you haven't spent hours shopping, chopping, peeling and preparing. All it takes is the oven time and you can feed your family a real dinner made with fresh ingredients. (Well they were fresh when they went into the freezer.)

The idea is only three years old but already there are more than 500 of these dinner shops all over middle America. The franchises are selling like hot cakes and no doubt they'll soon be available right here.

The logic of the concept is indisputable. It fills a niche in between the working mother's desire to feed her family well (none of this sexist stuff here but we are definitely talking women in the majority of cases) and the feelings of guilt at stuffing them with McDonald's or instant frozen dinners.

Just as cake mixes were revolutionised when a smart marketer had the idea of requiring the cook to add a fresh egg (this was not a necessary process, it just took the edge off the guilt of mixing powder with water to produce a cake) so this clever idea takes the edge off of feeding the family with instant meals and take-away.

But what about the cost of it all? How are you going to balance your budget if you haven't been buying your groceries in the market and supermarket? Surprisingly this method sounds expensive but it isn't.

$4 a dish

A typical charge is that of Dream Dinners - you can prepare 12 meals for $300. That comes out at $25 a meal, divided by six portions makes about $4 each. Now that compares pretty favourably to Chinese or hamburger takeaway options and is well within the range of the two income household. As it is, you're probably spending $100-200 a week on groceries and take-out so it will fit comfortably into your budget.

A bonus that's emerging is the development of "the cook-up night out". This is where half a dozen girls will come together at a store; prepare their family's meals as they chatter and natter their 20,000 words away, turning a nightly chore into a party of fun and friends. Hubby presumably stays at home in his recliner watching the footy with the kids, so you'll get no complaints from him.

Now I'm sure you're sitting there reading this and thinking: "Those Americans, what will they think of next? There's no way you'll see me doing that." Well then, what's the betting that in a year or two's time, your family will also be eating the occasional meal prepared at an assembly kitchen party, no doubt from a franchise in your suburb.

When that happens, pause for a moment between mouthfuls of chicken cacciatore and remember where you heard about it first.

kind regards

Ray Beatty

And finally; the smartest man in Harare.

Zimbabwe has received a bad press over the last couple of years,, but yet within it there are plenty of quick-thinking, enterprising business people. Take this example.

A Zimbabwean bus driver was given a contract to transport 20 mental patients

from Harare to a hospital in Bulawayo. It was a hot day and half-way there he stopped for a quick drink or two at an illegal bar. However when he came out he discovered that the patients had also found it too hot. They had all legged it and were nowhere to be seen.

Not wanting to admit his incompetence, he came up with an ingenious solution. He drove around the township bus stops offering anyone standing there a free ride to Bulawayo.

He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the nurses and security staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies.

They were taken inside - and the deception wasn't discovered for three days.

L2, Chadstone Place, Chadstone Centre, Victoria 3148, Australia
T: +613 9568 4445 F: +613 9568 4415 E: beatty@ebeatty.com W: www.ebeatty.com
RAY BEATTY ADVERTISING PTY LTD ABN 68 772 865 038