Cooked on Tuesday, delivered Wednesday: how PleNOSH meals are made

People sometimes ask how fresh a delivered meal can be. Fair question. Here's exactly what happens between the moment you order and the moment the box lands on your doorstep.

Thursday: the menu opens

Every Thursday at 9am a new menu goes live. 5 meat dishes and 5 vegetarian dishes, plus soups, salads, buns and sides. You can order a Weekly Meal Pack, a Mains to Share Pack, or pick individual dishes.

Sunday 10pm: orders close

This is the cutoff, and it matters. Once orders close, we know exactly how many of each dish to cook. We build the shopping list from your orders, not from a forecast. That's why we don't have a freezer full of stock waiting for someone to buy it.

Tuesday: cook day

Tuesday is when the kitchen comes alive. Connie runs the cook day, working through each dish in batches. Proteins are weighed and prepped, sauces are made from scratch, rice is cooked, vegetables are cut on the day.

Each Weekly Meal Pack container gets the same build: 100g of raw protein (or tofu for the vegan dishes), 160g of cooked rice, and the rest is vegetables and sauce, for a 400g meal. Mains to Share get 200g of protein per 500g pack, no rice, so you add your own.

Once a dish is cooked, it's cooled quickly under the Food Standards Code cooling rules before it's portioned and sealed. Every container is labelled with the full ingredient list and allergens.

Tuesday afternoon: pickup

If you've chosen pickup, your order is ready from Tuesday afternoon at our kitchen in Cheltenham.

Wednesday: delivery

Delivery orders go out Wednesday across Melbourne metro and the Mornington Peninsula. Meals travel chilled in insulated boxes with ice packs.

Why this matters

Because we cook to order, every meal you receive was made within about 24 hours of delivery. Nothing sat in storage waiting for a buyer. The menu you eat this week was cooked this week, for you and the other households who ordered it.

Plenty of our customers freeze some of their meals when they arrive so they've got dinner sorted for the following week too. That works well, and we've written a separate guide on how to store and reheat them.

Ready to try it?

The menu opens Thursday 9am and closes Sunday 10pm. New customers get 15% off their first order.

See this week's menu