From a Home Kitchen in Dubai to Feeding the City
What started as cooking for a friend turned into a meal prep company serving hundreds of customers across the UAE every single week.
A Melbourne kid with a thing for food
Eliza grew up in Melbourne with a food obsession. She cooked for her family, her friends, and for herself.
Saturday mornings meant the markets. Weekends meant trying to recreate whatever dish she'd eaten at her favourite restaurant that week - reverse-engineering it at home until she got it right. It was never a career plan. She just loved feeding people and she loved food that actually tasted like something.
From crew to manager at McDonald's
First job - McDonald's. She stayed long enough to become a manager, running shifts, training crew, keeping a kitchen moving when 200 orders hit at once.
Turns out that's pretty good training for running a meal prep business. Operations. Consistency. Food safety. Knowing how to keep your head when a kitchen is going sideways. None of it felt glamorous at the time. All of it matters now.
A decade flying with Emirates
Then came Emirates. Ten years as cabin crew, based in Dubai, flying to every corner of the world. Every layover turned into a food trip - eating her way through Bangkok, Tokyo, Istanbul, New York, Rome, Cape Town. Picking up flavours, techniques and obsessions from every city she landed in.
She'd come home jet lagged and straight into the kitchen trying to recreate whatever she'd eaten on the road. The name Jetlagged Chef? That came straight from the lifestyle. Always jet-lagged. Always cooking.
Then the world stopped
When COVID grounded the airline industry, Eliza suddenly had nowhere to fly. What she did have was a kitchen, a lot of free time, and a hunch she could do Dubai meal prep better than what was already on the market.
She started by cooking for one personal training client who needed properly tracked macros. That one became two. Then five. Then the Dubai fitness community started asking. Word of mouth did the rest.
Feeding hundreds, every single week
Today, Jet Lagged Chef serves hundreds of customers across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. The menu changes every week - no repeats, no boredom. Every meal is cooked fresh, never frozen, fully macro-tracked and comes with a barcode you can scan straight into MyFitnessPal.
We're not a factory. We're a kitchen. And Eliza still tastes every recipe before it goes out the door.
Built on Real Food