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The Cook's Grocer starts delivering meal kits in Canberra

Natasha Rudra

Fresh ingredients from The Cook's Grocer
Fresh ingredients from The Cook's GrocerSupplied

Canberrans who want to cook but don't want the hassle of shopping to a recipe have another meal kit option available.

Sydney-based company The Cook's Grocer has started delivering meal kits in the capital - a bag with all the ingredients and a recipe so that you can start cooking as soon as you get home from work.

Each recipe is designed to be made in 30 minutes and you should only need olive oil, salt and pepper in your pantry to cook each meal.

Owner Tim Ryder says Canberra was high on his list of cities to expand.

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"Canberra was a logical next step, it's close enough to make sure the food can arrive fresh and safe. And it's a real foodie market that's growing very quickly. We thought it would be a good fit," he says. "We're a small, boutique business, we just want to give people really good food, we're trying to make the food experience easy and really fun and enjoyable."

Ryder and business partner Elizabeth Masters started the business about 18 months ago and have a store in Rozelle in Sydney's inner west.

"Once we started producing the meal kits there was a real demand for online," he says.

The Cook's Grocer twist is that often the recipes and dishes come from restaurants, from reality TV shows or from new cookbooks.

Ryder has worked with chefs to create recipes from Sydney restaurant Nomad, from the My Kitchen Rules crew, and you can even get recipes from cookbooks from Murdoch Books.

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You order the meal kits online a couple of days in advance and they're delivered to your door three days a week. They start from $11 a person and you can get meal plans where three or four meals are delivered to your door starting from $99 a week.

"We do Saturday, Monday and Wednesday, it arrives before 7am, it's left on your doorstep and off you go," he says.

"There's no waste, it works out on the north side of $10 a person. For $100 a week, two adults can have three great meals a week."

Ryder says it gives "the choice, the cookbook experience without the need to go out." He also replicates ingredients exactly from restaurant recipes, sourcing produce, fish and meat from the same farms that supply the restaurants. And he simplifies.

"It's essentially a pared down version of their recipes so you can make it in 30 minutes," he says.

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And he's very keen to do the same partnerships with restaurants and chefs in Canberra, so chefs should hit him up if they're interested.

See thecooksgrocer.com.au

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Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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