Building Your Food Business
You have good product concept or a good food product that you want to make it a business. However, you are not sure if it is a good idea. Now, where do you start? Let start with the basis:
- Define your products or idea as details as possible to capture your business intention or mission. In another words, what is the goal of the introduction of the product. Example, vegan gelatin product to ensure vegan are able to enjoy confectionary product.
- Define who is your target market? Who is your target market? Is it for everyone or for specific group? Can they be categorized by age, gender, interest or purchasing behaviour?
- Reach your target market through marketing and distribution. What would appeal to your target market? Do they regularly obtain information through newspaper, television, brochure, product information display at the store, internet or radio?
- Make sure your product is distributed at the location your target customer will perform the purchase? Where do they shop regularly? Is it a general groceries store, online stores or specific health product stores? It is important that your customer are able to obtain your product easily to encourage purchase.
- How do you make the product and distribute the product? Who are the key personnel that you need to have to ensure the business operation are in orderly manner?
- How do you finance your business? Are you able to sustain the business until it can sustain itself?
- Perform a SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunities and threat analysis) to make sure the opportunities is greater than the threat and the strength of your business should be greater than the weakness. Evaluate the competitor to see if you have a unique properties
Once you figure out the basis, it is time to submit a business registration and start your business with persistence and open mind that as a business owner, you will face challenges and these challenges can be overcome. Tips: delegate whenever you can. It is often difficult to delegate because you want to do everything by yourself.
In part 2, let’s go through few tips to make food production safe that must be considered by all food business owner, regardless of their background knowledge of food.
About this series:
Most often, it is difficult to take the first step to say “I want to start a business”. This is a part of “Building Your Food Business” education series for those who like to start a successful food business with customer and food safety consideration in mind.
About the Author:
Felicia Loo is a food science graduate from UBC. With an interest in food marketing, she explores how food products are created, marketed, and distributed to an end users.
Find me on LinkedIn. Tweet me @felicialoo. Visit me at www.felicialoo.com.
Copyright ©Felicia Loo 2015
Disclaimer: This article is solely reflective of my personal thoughts. While every caution has been taken to provide my readers with most accurate information and honest analysis, please use your discretion before taking any decisions based on the information in this article. Author cannot compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this article.
