Holiday pre-orders

Thanksgiving Pre-Orders for Home Cooks: Sides, Pies and Cutoff Dates

Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26 this year, which means your real day is Wednesday the 25th. That is when the trays go out the door. Everything else in this post is about getting to that Wednesday with a list you can cook, ingredients you already paid for, and nobody texting you at 9 PM Tuesday asking if it is too late to add a pie. Four decisions get you there: what you sell, when orders close, how many you can make, and when people pick up.

What can you sell from home for Thanksgiving?

Start with the law, because it decides the menu. Most of the Thanksgiving table needs the fridge: mac and cheese, dressing, greens, candied yams, turkey, gravy, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie. Cottage food laws, the rules that let you sell cookies and jam from home with little or no permit, are mostly written for foods that keep at room temperature. So the sides and the custard pies are generally outside those rules. Rolls, cookies and fruit pies are the kind of thing on many states' lists. What you can sell from your own kitchen depends on your state and county, so read their page before you post a menu, and if a number is not on that page, ask them.

If your state has a home kitchen permit for cooked meals, that is the route for the full plate. If it does not, a licensed commercial kitchen is the other route, and your county can tell you what that takes.

Chefry is a marketplace, not a regulator. We do not issue, check or police anyone's permits, and every cook is responsible for their own licensing and food safety. You can set up your page and menu before you have a permit. Selling is on you and your county.

Keep the menu short

Thanksgiving is the one week you will be tempted to list everything you know how to make. Do not. Three to five dishes, sold by the tray, is a menu you can shop for in one trip and cook in one kitchen. Pick the two things people already come to you for, add one pie, and stop there.

Sell by the half tray and full tray, so one order is never one scoop. Say what each tray feeds. Then do the math once, on paper. Say a half tray of mac and cheese costs you $14 in cheese, pasta, milk and foil, and you price it at $35. Sell 20 of them and that is $700 in orders, and with 0% commission on menu orders you keep the $700. Your ingredients for all 20 were $280. The rest is your time and your oven.

If a number in that example is off for your kitchen, change the number, not the method.

When should orders close?

Count backward from the handoff. Pickup is Wednesday, November 25. Cooking is Tuesday and Wednesday morning, or all of it Wednesday if your permit has a same-day rule like LA's MEHKO. Shopping is Monday, when you know the final count. So orders close Sunday, November 22. If you buy your proteins somewhere that needs a few days' notice, close on Saturday the 21st instead.

Put that cutoff on your menu, not just in a caption. On Chefry each pickup day has an order cutoff before it, and when the cutoff passes the day stops taking orders on its own. Nobody has to tell a customer no at 10 PM Monday, because the page already did. Then say the date in every post until then. People do not plan Thanksgiving on your schedule.

How many can you actually make?

The cap is your oven, not your audience. Time one full tray of each dish from raw to done. Count how many trays fit in the oven at once. Multiply by the hours you have to cook before pickup (Wednesday only, under a same-day rule), then take some off for the pie that has to go in alone. That number is your stock.

Put it on each dish as a stock count. When the last half tray of dressing sells, the dish shows sold out and you are not deciding at midnight whether to disappoint a regular or sleep. If you have a daily meal limit under your permit, the stock count is also how you stay under it. If you sell out early, that is next year's price going up. This year you cook what you sold.

One pickup window, said plainly

Traffic the day before Thanksgiving is heavy, for you and for them. One window, say 12 PM to 4 PM, keeps you at the door for a few hours instead of all day. Put the window on the menu so nobody has to ask, and write your pickup notes once (which door, where to park). They go out with the address when you mark an order ready. A cooler by the door for the cold trays and a labeled bag per order means the handoff is quick.

Tape reheating directions to every tray: oven temperature, covered or not, how long. That answers the Thursday morning texts before anybody sends them.

Set the page up before you post the menu

Running this through DMs works until it does not. Somebody pays half, somebody forgets, the screenshot is from the wrong week. A pre-order page is built for this week:

• •You choose the pickup days. Open Wednesday the 25th only, with the window you set.
• •Set the order cutoff for Sunday, and the page closes for you.
• •Each dish has its own stock count. Sold out means sold out, without you refreshing a spreadsheet.
• •Customers pay by card when they order, so nobody pays half and nobody sends you a screenshot. Payouts are instant, to your own bank account through Stripe.
• •When you add a pie or restock the greens, the people who saved your page get a notification.
• •The page works as your link in bio, so the Instagram post and the order form are the same place.

Listing is free and there is 0% commission on your plates, for every chef. Upload the photos you already have at signup and they are read into a first menu you can edit. Nothing is exclusive, so keep selling wherever you already sell. To see how Thanksgiving pre-orders look to a buyer in Los Angeles, open the LA Thanksgiving page.

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