Australia's first gourmet food home delivery service

The inspiration and success of Gourmet Dinner Service

Gourmet Dinner Service was founded by Janel Horton. One evening over drinks with work colleagues at the Oaks Hotel, Neutral Bay, Sydney they were lamenting just how long their work days were becoming and how little time they had to cook. It suddenly dawned on Janel, that the market wanted outsourced help for traditionally time consuming tasks, like cooking.

Already a trained chef, combining her skills in food, marketing and finance and instinct, Janel gave up her high powered finance career and launched Gourmet Dinner Service.

In the early years, around the mid-90s few people understood the concept, thinking it was a catering service for dinner parties. Today people have caught up with the idea of outsourcing meals yet Gourmet Dinner Service still doesn't have any direct competitors, even though consumers are demanding their kind of service.

Educating the market that frozen dinners are good for you has been a major challenge. The era of the 80s supermarket frozen dinner had given frozen food a bad name. It was perceived to be 'frozen fast food' of poor quality. Today 'slow cooking' is now revered as a superior way of cooking full flavoured meals in comparison to the poor flavour of fast processed food. GDS has always been about offering slow cooked meals which are snap frozen. Frozen is also a very safe way to transport and store meals.

Today, Gourmet Dinner Service employs a team of chefs and kitchenhands working in a newly custom built 400 square metre commercial kitchen with walk in freezer room in Brookvale, Sydney.