Bring Your Fresh Ideas to Market and Profit Fueled by growing consumer demand for new tastes, cleaner ingredients, health benefits, and more convenient ways to shop and eat, the business of specialty food is taking off at full speed. This step-by-step guide arms entrepreneurial foodies like yourself with an industry overview, the hottest trends, important research and statistics, and insight from practicing specialty food business owners on key growth drivers, opportunities, and how you can differentiate from other food businesses. Discover how to: Find the right avenue for your specialty food business: home-based, retail shop, production, wholesale, or distribution Create a solid business plan, get funded, and get the essential equipment Get the right licenses, codes, permits, insurance for your operations Gain a competitive edge using market and product research Find a profitable location, partnerships, and in-store shelf space Promote your business, products, and services online and offline Attract new and loyal customers using social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest Manage daily operations, costs, and employees Plus, get valuable resource lists, sample business plans, checklists, and worksheets

Business wisdom from more than seventy-five food industry experts, specialty food buyers, and entrepreneurs to help you start and run a small culinary concern. For those ready to follow their foodie dreams (or at least start thinking about it) Good Food, Great Business is the place to get organized and decide whether creating a specialty food business is really possible. Whether the goal is selling a single product online or developing a line of gourmet foods to be sold in grocery chains, this working handbook helps readers become food entrepreneurs—from concept to production to sales to marketing. Using real life examples from more than seventy-five individuals and businesses that have already joined the ranks of successful enterprises, the book walks readers through the good, the bad, and the ugly of starting a food business. In these pages, you’ll learn . . . Personal habits and business fundamentals that will help you in every walk of life How to choose the business idea or ideas that best fit you and your personality How to determine the viability of those ideas Concrete steps you need to take to make your business a reality

Are you one of the many people who dream of making a profit selling your own homemade foods? Now, with this one-of-a-kind, easy-to-follow guide, you can realize your home-based food business dreams! With over 30 years' experience, author Mimi Shotland Fix takes you step-by-step through the process of starting and running a food business.Whether you've always envisioned yourself with a home-based food business, need a second source of income or want to stay at home and be your own boss, Start & Run a Home-Based Food Business offers dozens of tips, examples and advice for you to run a profitable business from your own kitchen! The bonus download kit features resources and forms in PDF and MS Word formats. This includes: lists of books, websites and trade magazines, national and regional suppliers, sample contracts, invoices and accounting forms, tried-and-true recipes, and more!

A comprehensive guide to planning, preparing, marketing, and selling gourmet foods for the takeout market, a natural extension for caterers, food retail stores, and restaurants. This book discusses everything from planning to opening and operating, designing a "store" concept, setting up displays, marketing the food, equiping the kitchen and display area, and training sales and kitchen staff.

A pick-your-own-path guide to launching and sustaining a successful food or beverage business The specialty food and beverage business is a thriving industry, and the barriers to entry are low: all you need is a recipe idea and a place to make it. It sounds simple, but launching a food or beverage company is a maze of choices and consequences. Douglas Raggio has been there, both as a food business founder and as a consultant to other successful start-ups, and he’s come to learn that every choice a food founder makes has a fairly predictable outcome. In So You Wanna: Start a Food or Beverage Business, he helps you think through the many decisions you’ll make along the road from idea to success—whether you see yourself building a following at your farmer’s market, partnering with a local restaurant, or launching the next Pepsi. This innovative guide follows four archetypal food start-ups that cover a range of business ideas and founders. Every few pages, you’ll make crucial decisions about the next step to take in growing a hypothetical business. You’ll have a chance to see how each choice is likely to play out before you try out anything in the real world, where the stakes are higher. In this book, you’ll see the maze of choices and outcomes that go into: Coming up with an exciting, profitable new product Funding your start-up Conducting market research Pricing and producing to scale Establishing partnerships, promotions, and branding Deciding when to keep going—and when to fold By understanding the perils and pleasures of this fast-growing industry, you will be able to approach your own business with confidence, make the decisions that feel right to you, and avoid the most common pitfalls along the way.

Many small food business owners dream of seeing their products on store shelves, but how to get onto those shelves is a mystery. Focused specifically on specialty food businesses that don't have millions of marketing dollars at their disposal, this book unravels that mystery for food entrepreneurs, offering tactical tips, insight, and short stories of entrepreneurs who have been in your place and succeeded. Topics include: * Understanding the wholesale industry and the roles that brokers and distributors play * Pricing products appropriately so that you can grow and make money * In-depth insight into a variety of wholesale food channels, covering what you need to know and how you should approach specialty stores, supermarkets, club stores, and even food service and hospitality * How and why you should support your retailers to ensure you stay on the shelf * Information on labeling regulations and packaging guidelines to ensure your product gets noticed by customers and conforms with FDA requirements * Definitions and explanations of common wholesale and promotional terminology * Creating sales sheets that help your product sell-and samples to help guide you * The role trade shows play and how to make the most of them

Each chapter takes the reader step-by-step through everything needed to get a small food business up and running including: business plans; obtaining licenses and registering the business; understanding costs and pricing; marketing and branding; and developing business tools to track finances.