My Biz: Food-prep company wants to save you time

Owners: Troy and Lora Miller

Company: Naomi's Kitchen

Address: 25 East Cherry St., North Liberty

Phone: (319) 665-4707

Website: www.NaomisKitchen.com

Elevator pitch: “We sell food - but we really sell time.”

NORTH LIBERTY - Naomi's Kitchen is Iowa's original and only existing meal assembly business, according to its owners.

Troy and Lora Miller opened the business in 2004 in a 100-year-old historic building that once housed Kozer's Grocery Store. Troy left his junior high teaching position and Lora her school nurse job to devote full-time attention to growing the business.

The menu choices run the gamut from shredded chicken tacos to cranberry pineapple pork roast to orange ginger salmon.  But they don't do organic meals, nor do they cook for special dietary needs.

“I have to stick with what the masses need,” Lora explained.

The food is packaged, frozen and ready for when people's schedules don't allow them time for cooking a well-planned meal.

Lora's sister introduced her to the once-a-month cooking concept that swept the country some years back.

“I really liked it because it saved money and time, and our meals were always prepared ahead. But it was a lot of work, and it was a mess,” she recalled.

“So when I went to a place in Nebraska that utilized the once-a-month program through a food-prep center concept, I came home and told Troy, ‘Somebody has got to do this here.'”

They named their business after their eldest daughter, Naomi.

“Initially our model started with folks coming in and assembling their own entrees,” Troy said. “It was a lot of work for us, and we needed a lot of employees to set up, to man sessions and tear down.

“It was a novelty at the time, and people enjoyed it. But we wanted to transition our customers to, ‘We love your food, why don't you just make it for us?'”

This past summer they discontinued the prep sessions. Today their products are available through pickup or delivery.

The business employs 6 part-time people to do the food preparation during 5-day work weeks, overseen by a full-time kitchen manager the Millers' hired six months after opening the business.

October is traditionally their busiest month, after people have settled into the back-to-school regimen. They add an additional 9 employees during the summer when Isaac's Creamery, their hard-scoop ice cream store, is running. (That business is named after their son.)

Lora sets up the monthly menus from a collection of more than 300 recipes. Troy handles “the nuts, bolts and numbers side of things” in addition to the marketing and advertising for the business.

“We serve thousands of individual customers a year,” he added, noting “that each customer comes in and gets between 45 and 72 servings at a time.”

“We have families with young children, professionals who just don't have time to cook,” Lorna said. “We have people who buy our two-serving-sized entrees for their parents who are aging and don't want to cook anymore.

“People purchase our food for Christmas gifts, for new babies, for somebody whose had surgery, or a death in the family.”