After 15 years of teaching in Sioux Falls, Sara Geelan decided to make a career switch.
Her love for cooking and meal prepping for her husband, Shea, and three active children transitioned into a business at the end of 2017. When it became harder and harder to serve something healthy for breakfast, lunch and snacks, Geelan started to meal prep for her family of five on Sundays.
“My husband and I were set Monday through Friday for breakfast, lunch and our snacks. We started doing that and friends and co-workers started noticing and questioning us on it and asking us where we got the meals,” she said.
Geelan and her husband started Dialed in Nutrition after building a commercial kitchen and getting licensed in December 2017. They took three months testing recipes on Shea’s co-workers before beginning to sell their pre-packaged meals in a few places in Sioux Falls.
They started selling their ready-to-eat meals at Ekin Nutrition in Sioux Falls and added more locations like Fitness First in Tea. Orders can also be placed on their website. She most recently added making meals for a daycare.
Geelan cooks Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and does deliveries on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All of her meals are made fresh and delivered either that day or the next morning. All of the containers are freezer safe and can be warmed up in the microwave.
All of the containers are one size, but people can choose from four different portion sizes for most meals. They offer different sizes because everyone’s macronutrient needs are different.
While they sell a number of meals in gyms, Geelan said the meals are not just for athletes.
“With our meals, it’s not just for an athlete. It’s for the working professional, the athlete, the busy families. That’s the nice thing about ours, everybody can eat them,” she said.
Every meal comes with a nutrition label with the nutrition information, ingredients and allergens. They have a menu that is set for three weeks and then will change for another three weeks for the variety they offer in stores.
If ordering from the website (dinmeals.com), they have a wide variety of options to order from.
During the pandemic, Geelan had some challenges. With a lot of the meals being sold in gyms, a lot of them were closed. She did do home delivery during the beginning of the pandemic.
“As far as orders, it still stayed steady. At that time, I did open up home delivery, which really helped families just because they didn’t want to have to leave their home. Those orders increased,” she said.
For people in the Lennox and Tea area, Dialed in Nutrition meals can be picked up at Fitness First in Tea