They say “necessity is the mother of invention.” For some that means looking for a need and seeing how they could fix it. For others, it means years of hard work developing a product, and then trying to find where it’s needed. For Nathan Allman, the owner and co-founder of Chefs for Seniors, he saw the necessity firsthand with his own family.

Allman, along with his father, created a service to bring customizable, nutritious meals to senior citizens throughout the greater Madison area, after watching his great-grandmother move out of her home and into an assisted living facility.

“The primary reason she had to move out of the house she’d lived in for 60 years was that she wasn’t eating enough, and it was a huge burden for my extended family to grocery shop and cook meals for her,” Allman said. “We thought that if there was a service that would have done her grocery shopping and prepared nutritious meals for her, that she would have been able to stay in her home longer and save a lot of money in the process.”

With his father’s 30 years of experience as both a professional chef and restaurant manager, and Allman finishing up his degree in finance and marketing from the University of Wisconsin School of Business, they decided to team up and do something about the situation.

Working on a case-by-case basis, Chefs for Seniors will meet with each client to develop a menu plan based on both food preferences and dietary needs. As Allman explained, this is typically done prior to the “service day” when the chef does the actual food preparation.

On the service day, the chef will visit the grocery store of the client’s choosing and purchase all the groceries needed until the next service visit. These groceries would include all the ingredients necessary for all the meals in the menu plan, but also any other items the client may need (e.g. coffee creamer).

The chef then brings the groceries to the client’s own kitchen where the meals are prepared, packaged and labeled, making it easy for the client to follow the proper reheating and serving instructions. Once the meals have all been prepared, the chef cleans the kitchen and their own equipment–which they bring to the client’s home–leaving the home just as they found it.

Since its clients are handled on a case-by-case basis, Chefs for Seniors offers its services on an hourly basis. According to Allman, it provides a relatively low-cost solution when compared to the average costs of assisted living facilities.

“For many of our clients, the average weekly cost of our service is between $45-75, and the price is entirely dependent on the amount and types of meals prepared,” Allman said. “The average cost of an assisted living facility in Wisconsin costs about $40,000/year.”

Since taking fourth place in the annual Burrill Business Plan Competition this past May, Chefs for Seniors has been off to a good start, according to Allman. He said he’s excited about the company’s future based on three simple principles: customization, personal relationships and food quality.