Hey, everybody. This is Heidi St. John. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm glad you're here because today is part two of an interview that I'm doing with my friend Aaron Chase. She's the founder of $5 dinners.com. And today we're going to tackle the topic of freezer meals. This is going to be great. If you're a busy mom, you're going to love it. Stick around. I think you're going to be encouraged.

All right. I'm going to jump right into this Aaron Chase is here. I don't often get her have her on my show. Sometimes he run into each other out on the speaker circuit. But I love what she's doing, especially right now, because as we talked about yesterday inflation is through the roof right now.

A lot of you guys are feeling it first. We felt it at the pump that always translate. So these carriers that are bringing her food to you. You guys knew that eventually this is going to happen. They're going to pass the prices on that they are paying to have this food delivered on to the consumer. And this is really what we're feeling right now.

I mean, I can talk about inflation for the next 60 days, but we won't do that. I'm not going to make anybody cry today. Instead, I'm going to make you guys happy because Aaron is on here and she's going to talk about how you can save money. And why this is so good for your families Aaron Chase. Welcome back to the podcast.

Hey, thanks. I'd be excited to chat more about this. I'm glad that you're here. Let's jump right into it. You started making freezer meals a long time ago. Tell us how you got into how you got into it.

I actually started because I was ordering or buying, you know, bulk ingredients from the warehouse store. I think when Ryan was six or seven, we kind of went from, oh, we need more things. We got to transition a little bit away from still go to the grocery store, but kind of a balance of warehouse store grocery store. And so I'm buying a cans of black beans, a cans of tomato sauce, you know, a huge giant packed of ground beef.

What am I going to do with all of this? And so in 2013, I shared a kind of a make ahead how I did these 20 meals at the time of $150 actually priced it all out. It's about 170 the same exact set of ingredients. It's not awful.

But as as percentage increase of everything else, so all that to say the warehouse stores prices are up, but they're not quite up as high as other grocery stores. I think because they have a little bit more bargaining power with the wholesale and bulk.

Because they're buying in bulk too. So yeah, makes it a little bit more say and, you know, how much they're willing to whatever all those contracts that happen. We don't know about.

So I was doing this 20 meals for $150. Let's say 170 or 180, which is still a really great bargain for a meal for four people. And they just went bananas viral. I had already been doing freezer cooking. And so I just kind of repackaged all of that.

And we built web apps, mobile apps, an entire program around the concept of either going to the warehouse store and getting all of these bulk ingredients and mixing and matching them so that you're not eating the same meal over and over.

You're going to eat similar ish meals, but it's not the same exact meal because you're going to mix and match. You don't feel like you're eating that, you know, talk with 16 times.

So we love talk with soup. We love talk with soup. Don't knock it. You can do a lot of things at talk with soup.

You can use the leftovers and a lot of fun different ways too. But, you know, you can you can do a different things instead of, you know, the ground beef. You don't have to make, you know, 10 meals of talk with soup.

You can do, you know, talk with soup and meatballs and sloppy jokes. You can mix and match like that. Right. So that's what I started to do.

And it just it was the response was so overwhelming. And this was back in 2013 where we had come out of the 2008 recession. People were still, I would say at that time, still a little bit tighter and like,

I think we're going to see that similar similar thing. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I see it. I feel it. I read about it. You know, anecdotally, just from different people.

And just for fun. I'm going to throw it in here. You can think the Democrats for this. Like we think the Democrats the first time. And I say we just thank him again. Cause that's what's happening. Carry on. Yeah.

Yeah. No, different. I would say different reasons are different kind of cause and effect factors. Yeah. Same mindset. Yes. Yes.

So we are now facing, I feel that same pressure back in the summer of 2008 with gas prices then as well. And but we didn't have back then. There was not the same dramatic effect on the increased cost of food.

Because I think the gas price spike went a little higher. I'd have to go back and look. I'm just saying that off of what I know. But now the gas prices have been higher longer. So that's what's affected the food price.

Absolutely. Like you said on the top of the show. So I think that all that to say we can fight against this. And my absolute favorite way to do this.

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