Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | winter 2006
Kristen Severs and Dawn Angus

 


WINTER 2006
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Kristen Severs and Dawn Angus: What's for dinner?

You’ve worked all day and it’s 6:30 and the kids are hungry.

What’s for dinner?

Frozen pizza? Chinese take-out? Fast food? Cold cereal? Microwave popcorn?

How about apple-sage pork roast and veggies? Or smoky steak chipotle chili? Or what about tomato pesto ravioli? And a crunchy caramel apple pie for dessert?

Sound like a lot of work? Well, if you’d planned ahead – and if you lived within driving distance of Des Moines, Iowa – you could have made one of these yummy dinners in advance.

A inventive new way to attack the drudgery of meal planning and preparation, “What’s for Dinner, Des Moines?” sprang from the creative minds of ISU grads Dawn Angus and Kristen Luna Severs, who modeled their business after a similar company on the west coast.



“What’s for Dinner?” is a surprisingly simple idea. You sign up for a session in the company’s gleaming chrome kitchen, located in a strip mall in West Des Moines. You bring a cooler, maybe a few friends and a couple bottles of wine, and you spend the next two hours happily fixing 12 meals to serve to your family over the next month. Moving from station to station, you follow the simple recipes, using ingredients that have been pre-purchased, pre-chopped, and sometimes even pre-measured, creating delicious, nutritious meals like Thai shrimp with peanut sauce, chicken picatta, and not-your-mama’s tortilla soup to take home in foil containers and freezer bags, ready to pop into the oven, microwave, or crock pot. The servings are huge, so unless you have a large family, you can be sure you’ll have leftovers.

The company opened its doors in October 2004, and so far business has been brisk. Customers range from young working mothers to empty-nesters and single folks who often opt to split sessions or make half portions. Many come back month after month.

“I had one lady last week who said, ‘You’ve changed my life!’” Angus said.

Severs and Angus see themselves as their own target market. Severs (’97 marketing) has a 2-year-old daughter; Angus (’94 marketing, ’98 MBA) has a 5-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

“Both of us know how hard it is to get home after work and do the end-of-the-day scramble where you’re picking the kids up from daycare, then you try to figure out what you’re going to make, then you actually have to make it, then you have to clean it up, then it’s bath time and bedtime and ooh! It’s crazy!” laughed Severs. “This gives you the chance to just come home and [your dinner has] been cooking in the crock pot all day so it’s ready. Or you just have to heat it up, and while that’s heating up you have time to decompress a little bit. People get to sit down and have a meal together. It’s wonderful.”

Sessions are offered five days a week, including evenings and Saturdays. Severs and Angus have nine employees, so they have more time to spend with their own families.

With backgrounds in business and communications, and friends who know about testing recipes and creating Web sites, the two women focus on planning menus, “tweaking” recipes, and adding new features to their business – like adding retail space and offering special holiday sessions.

So one might wonder, when they go home at night, what do Severs and Angus serve THEIR families?
“What’s for Dinner? food,” they say in unison, laughing. “I actually tried to make a lasagna from scratch two weeks ago,” Severs said. “It took me like three hours! And my kitchen was trashed. I decided that was ridiculous. What’s for Dinner? food is truly soooo efficient. So I only eat What’s for Dinner? food or I eat out. Okay? I’m not gonna lie. I eat out. I’m only human.”

Read on | Home cooking