Some menu items contain more fat and cream than Saef would like (her husband enjoys those) and other entrees haven’t necessarily saved her time in the kitchen, but the experience has so far been good enough that the family is sticking with it. On visits that are social—with girlfriends, for instance—she’s learned to lower her order, maybe choosing six instead of twelve entrees because all the “schmoozing and neighboring” slows down assembly times. The high-end, often gourmet entrees get mixed reviews from her children, ages 3 and 7.

“We had coconut-encrusted mahi mahi that my fussy eater just inhaled,” she says. “My husband and I just stared at each other and thought we’d be struck by lightning.”

She’s learned to avoid entrees she knows she could just as easily make (marinated flank steak for instance) and picked up some foodie tricks from the process. “I didn’t know you could take frozen chicken breasts, bread them, and keep them frozen,” she says. “It’s a great prep technique.”

Meal-assembly centers evolved out of the high-end personal chef industry that sprang up in the 1990s as well as once-a-month-cooking clubs that continue to gain speed in neighborhoods and online, particularly among mothers.

“Personal chefs are still around,” Vasquez says, “but they’re a lot more expensive. Plus you have to open your home up to them, and a lot of people don’t like that. Once-a-month cooking clubs are popular, too, to some degree, but it takes a long time to do the shopping and chopping, the preparation and assembly, so you’re not really cutting down on your time or your expense. Whereas with meal-prep stores, everything is done for you.”

Washington chef Kay Conley, who studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, came up with the meal-assembly concept over a cup of coffee with a friend, hoping to combine her dual passions of food and helping others. In February 1999, she opened the first outlet that married the personal-chef concept with once-a-month cooking. At Conley’s Month of Meals (mom), customers signed up online. Conley—whose signature dishes include chicken cacciatore and baby back ribs—bought the food, and rented a kitchen. Participants spent four to eight hours cooking and assembling meals. It was a long day, but the idea was there.

In August 2002, Cuizam and Dream Dinners, founded by Washington moms who liked to cook and freeze meals, carried on where MOM left off, taking meal preparation to a new level—assembly or par-cooking only, which reduced in-store time to two hours or less. An industry was born, and the idea spread like wildfire. Dream Dinners today has more than 100 outlets nationwide—nearly a fifth of the existing outlets in an industry expected to generate $270 million in 2006.

Word of mouth, largely, propelled the industry within three years from four Washington stores to 561 outlets nationwide, operated by eight franchises and 88 independent operators. The number of stores was expected to double in 2006, to 1,100, and market saturation (3,000-plus outlets) is expected by 2010, a mere eight years after the industry was born.

In early 2006, Texas ranked highest in overall outlets, with 82 centers. Washington, with 61 outlets, and Colorado, with 40, lead in market saturation—both have one meal-prep center for every 115,000 residents or so.

“Moms recognize immediately the role these businesses are fulfilling,” Vasquez says. “Everyone wants their life simplified and to have control over what the family is eating. They’re able to put dinner back on the table without spending hours and hours in the kitchen.

“Another thing, they’re assembling it—so they know exactly what’s going into it, they can control the amount of salt, even, whereas when you get something from takeout or deli or a restaurant, you don’t know exactly what’s going into that. People are tired, and they want healthier options, but with families with activities, there’s not enough time to cook dinner from scratch.”

The rapid spread of meal-assembly centers is “an amazing phenomenon—the best-kept secret in the business,” says Aftan Romanczak director of research and development and purchasing for Steak-Out, a 70-restaurant Georgia-based quick-service chain.

“It’s the Tupperware of the 21st century,” he says. “If you had a chain that grew to 800 units in a short time, it’d be front-page news.”

Vasquez says she doesn’t think, however, that meal-assembly will cut into restaurant profits. “There’s enough business to go around for everybody; it’s just another alternative for people to utilize,” she says.

So what are families giving up in order to serve dinners from meal-assembly outlets? No one’s done research, but word on the street is that it’s a range of other types of meals.

“It runs the gamut, everything from takeout food to serving their kids cereal for dinner to frozen dinners from supermarkets to going out to a sit-down restaurant,” Whitney says. “I would imagine that our service replaces the worst instances of things that happen. People are still going out to eat, and they’re still ordering pizza and driving through takeouts. But this certainly replaces the dinners that just don’t get made or get made badly. People will say they go shopping and have the best intentions, but the next weekend, they throw it all away because it was never made into anything.”