How to start a tiffin service in Canada

Many tiffin businesses in Canada start the same way. You cook for your family. A neighbour asks for an extra box. A few months later you are feeding forty people and losing track of who paid. The cooking was never the hard part. The hard part is everything around it.

This guide covers what you need before you can sell meals in Canada, and the choices that decide if the business is worth running as it grows.

1. Find out where you are allowed to cook

Everything else depends on this, and it is easy to get wrong. In every province, cooking food to sell is checked by your local health authority. Not the CRA, and not only your city.

You have three main choices:

• A commercial kitchen you rent by the hour. Many cities have shared kitchens. This is often the fastest legal way to start. The kitchen is already inspected, and you don't need a long lease.
• Your home kitchen, if allowed. Some health authorities allow home food businesses, with conditions. Others only allow low-risk foods from home, like baked goods or jams. Hot curries are usually not low risk. Don't guess. Call your local health authority and ask about your menu.
• Your own commercial kitchen. This costs the most. It is rarely the right first step.

In most places, whoever cooks will also need a food handler certificate. It is usually a short, low-cost course, and inspectors ask to see it.

2. Register your business and know when to charge tax

Register your business with your province or the federal government. Open a separate bank account for the business from day one. Then learn when you must start charging tax. In short: once your sales go over $30,000 over four quarters in a row (one year), you must register for GST/HST.

Many people are surprised that cooked meals are usually taxed, even though groceries are not. We explain this in GST/HST for tiffin and meal-prep businesses.

3. Plan a menu you can cook a hundred times

A restaurant gives people lots of choice. A tiffin menu gives them very little. That is how tiffin works: you cook a few dishes in large amounts, on a set schedule. That is why you can charge less than a restaurant and still make money.

Plan for these from the start:

• The same dish on the same weekday. Your shopping and cooking stay the same each week, and customers know what is coming.
• Dishes that are still good after an hour in a box. Food that goes soggy, splits or keeps cooking in its own heat arrives worse than it left.
• A veg menu and a non-veg menu, and not much more. Each extra menu means more cooking, more packing and more mistakes.
• Portions you have weighed. If you guess, your food cost can slowly climb from 30% to 45%.

4. Set your price before you sell

Set your price from your costs, not from what the kitchen down the road charges. Charging too little is a common reason tiffin businesses fail. It is hard to raise prices once customers are used to a number. The full method is in how to price a tiffin service.

One number to remember: food and packaging should be about 30% of your price. For example, if food and packaging cost $4.50 a meal, you need about $15 a meal to pay for everything else and still make money.

5. Pick delivery areas you can really serve

It is tempting to say yes to every address. Then you find that one customer forty minutes away costs more in gas and time than they pay you. Set delivery areas by the first three characters of the postal code, and deliver to each on set days.

• Start with the two or three postal areas closest to your kitchen.
• Charge more for areas further away, or don't deliver there.
• Do each area in one trip, so your driver doesn't cross the city twice.
• Only add a new area when it has enough customers to be worth the drive.

Close together beats spread out. Twenty customers in one neighbourhood can be a better business than forty spread across the city.

6. Get your first fifty customers

Tiffin grows by word of mouth. The places that work are simple:

1. 1WhatsApp and Facebook groups for your neighbourhood and your language community. Many kitchens find their first customers here.
2. 2A free trial box for a few people who know lots of others and like to talk.
3. 3Temples, gurdwaras, mosques and community centres. A notice on the board still works.
4. 4Students, who often don't have time to cook and tell their friends about good food.
5. 5A page where people can order. Not just a form. A page where they see this week's menu, pick a plan and pay.

7. Stop keeping it all in your head

As a tiffin kitchen grows, the problems are usually paperwork, not cooking. At twenty customers you can remember everything. At sixty you can't. The cook count is wrong because three customers texted overnight to pause. The new driver needs you to read out every address. Month-end is an hour of matching e-transfer emails to names you don't know.

Whatever you use, a notebook, a spreadsheet or software, you need these four things:

• One meal count that is right. Skips and pauses must show up in tonight's cooking list on their own. Otherwise the count is wrong.
• Routes your driver can follow without you. A driver should be able to start without calling you.
• Payments matched to meal plans. Not a bank statement you match from memory.
• Numbers you can see. Your food cost, who is due to renew, and who has quietly stopped ordering.

That is what Tiffinware does. It handles meal plans, a daily cooking list, delivery stops in the right order, a driver app, e-transfer and card payments, and sixteen reports including profit and loss. It is $99 a month with a 14-day free trial and no commission on your orders. You can open the demo without signing up, or book a free demo and we will walk you through it.

What to do this week

1. 1Call your local health authority and ask what your menu needs.
2. 2Book a food handler course.
3. 3Work out the cost of one meal from your planned menu, to the cent.
4. 4Pick two postal areas and only deliver there for now.
5. 5Post in three community groups and offer five free trial boxes.

Good recipes matter. But knowing your food cost early helps a kitchen last.