How to start a meal prep business in New South Wales

Often, yes — which is the main thing that separates New South Wales from most of the United States. The NSW Food Authority treats preparing or storing food at home for later sale as a food business, and says the requirements are the same as for any other retail food business. There is no separate cottage food law that bans meat, and no income ceiling that ends the arrangement.

The decision is your council's. The Authority's advice is blunt about it: before starting, make sure your proposed activities are allowed by your local council, and some councils may not approve operations involving high-risk foods. Chilled ready meals built on chicken, beef or fish are high-risk food, so a council that waves through a home baker may still say no to you. Ask before you buy equipment.

Domestic premises may be granted certain exemptions from the construction standards based on practicality and how often the business handles food, but not for kitchen and storeroom flooring, and not for personal hygiene facilities. You need adequate hand washing facilities — ask the council what it counts as adequate — and food kept protected from pests at every stage, including ingredient storage.

In practice, refrigeration is what ends most home meal prep businesses before the rules do. The Authority points out that overloading a domestic fridge and opening the door constantly means food takes longer to cool, and refrigerated food has to sit at or below 5 °C. One cook day of 60 portioned meals will not fit in a household fridge, and cooling them in it will breach the cooling rule long before an inspector does.

Food businesses in NSW either hold a licence from the NSW Food Authority or notify their details. Almost every meal prep business notifies. All retail food businesses must notify their local council before they begin to trade, and the Authority's list of who that covers names home-based food businesses that sell directly to consumers, caterers, mobile food outlets and outlets that sell food through third-party ordering apps.

Notification means giving the council your trading name, contact details, locations, owner details and the nature of your food business. Councils collect that in different ways — some have a notification form, some fold it into an application for a service, permit or approval — so start on your council's website and ring them if the page is unclear. Notification records are private to each business, so if you buy an existing meal prep business you notify again in your own name.

The split to watch is who you sell to. If you sell direct to the person who eats the food, the council regulates you. If you do not retail from the home premises — for example you cook at home and sell through a café or a gym that on-sells your meals — you notify the NSW Food Authority instead, and notification to the Authority is free for most businesses. Manufacturing high-risk food may also require a Food Authority licence, decided case by case.

Food Authority licences themselves cover meat, dairy, egg, seafood, shellfish and plant product businesses, food service to vulnerable persons, and transporters of those foods. A meal prep kitchen cooking for its own retail customers normally falls outside that list, but if you plan to wholesale, ring the Authority on 1300 552 406 and ask before you sign the deal rather than after.

The three realistic options are your own home, hired time in a commercial kitchen, and a lease of your own. Each one changes who you notify, what the fit-out costs and how much you can cook in a day.

A commissary or shared commercial kitchen rents cooking time and cold storage by the hour, the shift or the month. The building already meets Standard 3.2.3 for premises and equipment, which is the expensive part. Before you sign, ask three questions: whether you notify the council in your own right at that address, how much refrigerated and frozen space is yours and locked, and whether suppliers can deliver to you there on your cook days.

Your own space gives you the schedule and room to grow, and costs the most up front. Talk to the council's environmental health officers before you sign a lease. They will tell you what the space needs to pass — floors, coving, hand basins, a dedicated hand wash basin in the preparation area, mechanical exhaust, a cleaner's sink — and it is far cheaper to hear that before the fit-out than during it.

Whichever you choose, size it on cold storage rather than stove tops. A meal prep kitchen is a chilling operation with a cooking step attached. Cooked food has to come down from 60 °C to 21 °C within two hours and from 21 °C to 5 °C within a further four, and that is a blast chiller or a lot of shallow trays and spare fridge space, not a bigger oven.

NSW runs its own Food Safety Supervisor scheme, and a meal prep business is squarely inside it. The Food Authority requires all retail, hospitality and food service businesses to appoint at least one FSS per premises where the food they prepare and serve is ready-to-eat, potentially hazardous — that is, it needs temperature control — and not sold in the supplier's original package. The Authority's own list of who is covered includes caterers, home-based businesses and outlets selling through third-party ordering apps.

The FSS is nominated by the owner and can be the owner, a manager or an employee such as the chef, provided they are not the FSS for any other food premises or mobile catering business, can train and supervise other people in safe food handling, and are reasonably available and easily contactable. For a one-person meal prep business, that is you.

Certification comes from a Registered Training Organisation approved to deliver the NSW FSS program, and you must complete the whole course with a single approved RTO. There are two pathways, hospitality and retail, and the units must cover the Authority's mandatory key focus areas: allergen management, cleaning and sanitising, safe egg handling and Food Act offences. Course cost is set by the RTO; on top of it, an RTO may only charge a fee of $30 to issue the NSW FSS certificate.

The Food Act 2003 requires FSS certificates to be renewed every five years, and the business must keep a copy on the premises. When a certificate expires, the business has 30 days to get that person recertified within 30 working days or appoint another qualified staff member. A recertification course may only be offered up to 90 days after the expiry date — after that, the whole course starts again.

Standard 3.2.2A of the Food Standards Code sits underneath the NSW scheme and adds two things beyond the supervisor. The first is food handler training: a business selling unpackaged, potentially hazardous, ready-to-eat food must make sure its food handlers have the skills and knowledge to handle food safely. How you train them is up to you — the Food Authority's free Food Handler Basics course, internal training tailored to your own procedures, past experience, or a vocational provider. This is separate from the FSS requirement, and it applies to everyone who touches food.

The second is the evidence tool, which the Authority calls showing food is safe. It applies to businesses that process potentially hazardous food into food that is ready-to-eat and potentially hazardous and serve it to consumers — processing being chopping, cooking, drying, fermenting, heating, thawing or washing. That is exactly what a meal prep kitchen does every cook day, so plan on it from the start.

You have to be able to demonstrate control of the specific risks: food receipt, storage, display, transport, pathogen reduction in cooking, minimising time during processing, cooling, reheating, and cleaning and sanitising. You can do that by demonstrating safe practices, by keeping records, or both. Records are easier to defend a week later than a memory is, and the Authority publishes templates for them.

A probe thermometer and a habit of writing down what it read is most of this. Delivery temperatures, chiller checks, cook temperatures and the cooling clock are the four that an environmental health officer will ask about first.

If you package meals for sale, the Food Standards Code decides what goes on the label. The Food Authority lists the parts: the name of the food, the lot identification, the name and street address in Australia or New Zealand of the supplier, the list of ingredients, a best before or use-by date as appropriate, directions for use and storage, a Nutrition Information Panel, country of origin, and warning and advisory statements and the declaration of allergens. Chilled ready meals carry a use-by date, not a best before.

Allergen declaration changed on 25 February 2024 under Plain English Allergen Labelling. Standard 1.2.3 and Schedule 9 now require declared allergens to be named in the ingredient list in bold, in a font no smaller than the other ingredients, and repeated in a separate bold summary statement beginning with the word Contains, placed directly next to the statement of ingredients. Plain words are the point: milk, not casein or whey.

The declarable list covers wheat, fish, crustacean, mollusc, egg, milk, lupin, peanut, soy, sesame and nine tree nuts named individually — almond, Brazil nut, cashew, hazelnut, macadamia, pecan, pistachio, pine nut and walnut. Barley, oats and rye must be declared where they contain gluten, and sulphites at 10 mg/kg or more.

Where food does not require a label, the declaration still has to reach the customer: in connection with the food, or given to the purchaser on request, using the required names. The Food Authority's own line is the one to keep: if you are not 100% certain you can provide an allergen-free meal, you must tell the customer. Software can carry allergen data from an ingredient to a label; it cannot certify that a kitchen is free of an allergen, and no meal prep business should claim otherwise.

Get an Australian Business Number before anything else, because GST registration needs one. The ABN is an 11-digit number identifying the business to government, applications are free through the Australian Business Register, and a successful application issues it immediately. Not everyone is entitled to one, and the Registrar can review entitlement and ask for evidence that you started or took steps to start the enterprise.

Whether you trade as a sole trader, a partnership, a company or a trust is a decision for you and an accountant, and it affects tax, liability and what a landlord or a wholesale customer will accept. Register a business name if you trade under anything other than your own name.

Insurance is the part people leave until a customer asks for a certificate of currency. Public and product liability cover is normally what a shared kitchen, a market organiser or a corporate client wants to see, and your ordinary car policy will not cover a vehicle used to deliver meals for payment — tell your insurer what the vehicle is actually doing.

Most basic food in Australia is GST-free. Prepared meals generally are not. The ATO's list of taxable food includes food of a kind marketed as a prepared meal, but not including soup, and its GST-free list makes the same point from the other direction: raw, fresh or frozen meats for human consumption are GST-free except prepared meals. The way a product is marketed — its name, labelling, packaging, display and advertising — affects the classification, so a business selling a weekly menu of ready-to-heat meals should assume the meals are taxable and check.

You must register for GST within 21 days of being required to, and the GST turnover threshold is $75,000. Turnover is gross business income, not profit. Once registered you lodge a business activity statement. Registration is optional below the threshold, and if you choose to register you generally stay registered for at least twelve months.

How your particular menu is treated, whether to register early to claim credits on a fit-out, and how to lodge are questions for your accountant and, where the classification is genuinely unclear, for the ATO. Mealforma does not lodge anything and gives no tax advice. It holds the tax rate and tax-inclusive pricing as settings, which is how menu prices are shown GST-inclusive to customers, and it reports what you sold; the return is yours to lodge.

Potentially hazardous food has to be at or below 5 °C from your chiller to the customer's fridge, or you have to be able to show the safety of the food was not compromised. Between November and March, a closed car boot on a Sydney street reaches well above that in under an hour, so plan on insulated bags, gel packs frozen solid overnight, and a route short enough that the last drop is still cold.

Sydney punishes long routes in a specific way: the harbour. A run that crosses the bridge or the tunnel twice can lose forty minutes to the crossing alone, and the toll is the smaller cost. Build the north side and the south side as separate runs on separate days rather than one heroic loop. The same logic applies to the M4 corridor west and to the Sutherland Shire, which are their own days once you have more than a handful of customers in them.

Apartment buildings are the other tax on time. A drop that needs an intercom, a lift and a corridor takes three or four times as long as a front gate in the suburbs, and secure foyers mean nobody can leave a bag at the door. Ask at sign-up for the unit number, the buzzer code and a fallback — concierge, parcel room, or a neighbour — and hold it against the address rather than in a driver's head.

Tell customers a window, load the van in reverse stop order, and take a photo at each drop. If you have to leave a bag unattended, the food safety risk transfers to the customer and you should say so plainly in the delivery terms rather than discover the disagreement after a hot afternoon.

Most meal prep businesses sell by the week. Customers choose a plan — say 10 or 15 meals — pick their meals before a cut-off, and receive them on set delivery days. The cut-off is what makes the business work: it tells you exactly what to buy and cook before you have spent anything, and it is the difference between a kitchen that runs on orders and one that runs on guesses.

Cost each meal from its recipe: ingredients at the price you actually pay, the tray, the film, the label. Then add kitchen rent, labour, delivery and card fees per meal before you choose a price. If the meals are taxable, decide early whether your advertised price includes GST, because changing it later in front of existing subscribers is a conversation nobody enjoys.

Subscriptions smooth the weekly swing and make purchasing predictable; one-off orders and add-ons fill the gaps. Skips and pauses will happen — school holidays, a week away — so decide the rules for them before the first customer asks rather than settling each case by message.

Once orders arrive every week, the work is keeping the menu, the cut-off, the kitchen's quantities, the labels and the delivery runs in step with each other. Mealforma is meal prep software built for that: an online store with weekly subscriptions, production quantities worked out from locked orders, labels printed at real physical size from the recipe version the kitchen actually cooked, and each day's delivery run. Delivery zones, fees and cut-offs are settings you change yourself, as are the tax rate and tax-inclusive pricing.

Be clear about what it does not do. Mealforma does not certify anything, does not obtain a licence or notify a council for you, does not lodge tax, and is not legal advice. Allergen data flows from ingredient to recipe version to label because a person entered and approved it, not because software worked it out. You pay a flat monthly price in Australian dollars, it never takes a percentage of your sales, and each business gets its own database.