The Real Cost of a Personal Chef
February 8, 2007 by Greg
The first question people sheepishly ask about my personal chef is about whether it is expensive. The simple answer is yes. There are a few other factors to consider here though, such as quality of the meal, health, and time saved. To accurately answer this question requires a dissection of the real cost of a personal chef.
The cost of my personal chef was $375 for 5 unique meals with 4 servings each. We’ll call that 20 meals. That brings the total cost of the meal to $18.75 a meal. A premium indeed.
To make the comparison, we’ll look at the cost of having a meal prepared by a personal chef vs preparing the same meal myself.
Looking at just one meal, the first one, my rough approximations for cost would be:
Soup: $7
Salad (w/ dressing): $7
Quinoa: $6
Total: $20
$20 is a rough estimate, but it will work. The prices might seem high, but these meals include ingredients like leeks, mangos, blue berries, pomegranate juice, tortellini, and more. Multiplied by 5 meals, the total cost for 20 meals is $100. Divided up, it’s about about $5 a meal.
The second factor to consider is time. This meal would probably take about 2 hours of my time to prepare, cook, and clean up afterwards. Multiplying by 5 meals, It would take me 10 hours to make all the dishes. Adding to this 1 hour for menu planning and 1 hour for grocery shopping. I would guess I could attempt a similar job in 12 hours (see my article on professionals being more efficient).
In the end, the difference between cooking myself and using a personal chef is about $275 and 12 hours of my time. The questions to ask are:
- Is my time worth more than $23 an hour?
- Do I have the ability to prepare a comparable meal?
- Do I have the discipline to plan, shop, and prepare all my meals at once (saving time)?
These are all personal questions, and can only be defined by an individual. It also makes a big assumption, that you actually can and will cook like this.
One last question I will pose is about the cost of leisure. The chef cost at $275 a month is $3300 a year. It saves 12 months x 12 hours work, or 144 hours. Would you take a job that paid $3300 less per year for but gave you an extra 144 hours paid vacation (18 days)?
It’s an interesting question indeed.
It could certainly be said that you could prepare equally healthy (if not nearly as extravagant) meals for far less money and time, increasing both your disposable income and still freeing up some hours.
The paid vacation angle is something I’m not entirely clear on. If you’re paying $3300 for the 144 hours extra you have available in your year, those extra hours are costing you that sum, you’re not being ‘paid’ that amount for them.
You are definitely right. Healthy meals can be had for much cheaper and easier. For the sake of comparison, I make the assumption that the quality of meals you eat with or without a personal chef stays the same.
As far as the vacation goes…
Say you have a job that makes 60k a year. If you pay 3,300 for chef service, you have 56,700 left over, and you have an extra 144 hours that you would’ve otherwise been cooking.
So, the question is, would you trade your 60k a job for a 56,700 a year job if you had to work 144 hours less a year?
So you’re equating work with cooking. Gotcha.
yup, anything i would rather not do i call ‘work’
hat tip david allen ala getting things done