Cook Wrap Sell

A guide to starting and running a successful food business from your kitchen

Bruce McMichael

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781908003492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Activité entrepreneuriale

From producing for pleasure to producing for profit!With the growing demand for traditional, well-cooked, locally-sourced, homemade food there's never been a better time to start your own food business. You can sell your products at local food fairs, farmers' markets, food festivals and online. You can even get the ear of the supermarkets. Meanwhile, with modern technology and social media, it's never been easier to promote your products.Produced in partnership with Country Living Magazine, this book will help you to:- turn your love of food into a thriving small business, with the right idea and a watertight business plan- create a home-based kitchen that complies with health and safety legislation- use social media to promote your produce and brand- become part of a vibrant community selling at farmers' markets and food festivals across the UK- sell into shops, pubs and giant supermarket chainsThis book is sprinkled with real-life stories of people making money from cooking, baking, blogging and much more besides. You'll meet soft drink producers, beef burger and sausage makers, chocolate and fudge specialists... and more.All of them started from scratch and are now successfully selling into everywhere from farm shops to supermarkets. With this book you can join them.

PART ONE. Starting Your Food Business

CHAPTER 1. Cooking up a Great Idea

Starting your home-based food business

TAKE A PINCH of optimism, a spoonful of passion and a good measure of hard work and you have the basic ingredients for a home-based food business.

Have you always worked for someone else, but secretly dreamed of being your own boss? Faced with a discouraging job market, perhaps you’ve thought about creating your own job? Maybe you have a book full of recipes just waiting to get out there.

Whatever your motivation, running your own food business from home is a wonderful opportunity and should, I believe, be grasped with both hands.

It’s important to understand what it isn’t, though.

It isn’t merely an expansion of ordinary kitchen life – cooking and baking for family, guests or fun. To an observer, scaling up to commercial production is just a matter of more – more ingredients, more measuring, more cooking.

The full picture is not quite so simple.

Creating a profitable business demands investment in time, skills, equipment. Perhaps, too, in facilities and business and technical support. Most of all it requires a different mindset: a shift from producing for your own pleasure to producing for your own profit.

None of this, of course, need be daunting, expensive or soulless – and this book will help you navigate your way through it all. But the difference in approach – really in attitude – does need to be borne in mind from the start.

Running your own food business is more challenging than cooking for fun. Thankfully, it’s also a lot more rewarding.

Key steps in creating your business

This is the age of ethnic cooking, gastro pubs and local produce. Provenance, animal welfare and culinary innovation are important as perhaps never before. The British food revolution demands high quality food, backed up with a story and integrity. It also increasingly seeks value. This is the space which a new wave of food entrepreneurs are successfully occupying, and the arena this book is all about helping you to enter.

The route to success today looks something like the following:

• Research – is there a market for your product or service?
• Business plan – write a plan; a route-map to business success.
• Get cooking – deliver food that beats your customers’ expectations.
• Marketing and selling – use everything from word-of-mouth to websites and social media to share what makes your produce the best.

The rest of this chapter and the next will focus on getting and perfecting your idea through research, with the remainder of the book taking you through the other steps.

“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart ... pursue those.”

– Michael Nolan, author

What’s your niche?

So, do you want to be a cupcake-baker, bread-maker, food stylist or photographer, recipe-writer or wedding-caterer – to create artisan produce or dream up international brands?

There are endless ways you can turn your passion for food into a business.

Start by asking: what is my niche? What skills, experience and interests in food do I have, and what marketplace(s) does this lead to?

The right speciality, effectively occupied, will be profitable. And don’t feel you have to run away from competitive markets or reinvent the (cheese) wheel. It’s okay to do things just slightly differently, maybe just more effectively, than others out there.

What twists of your own can you add?

TIP: Consider Fraser Doherty of Scotland’s SuperJam business (www.superjam.co.uk). As a fresh-faced 14-year old, Fraser used his grandmother’s recipe and his mother’s kitchen to enter the overcrowded jam market – standing out by making it healthy and fun. SuperJam is now selling all over the UK and building a strong export market.

The three Cs of the food business

There are three Cs that are key to every successful food business:

Cuisine

Offer food that you’re familiar with and can produce at consistently high quality. You want clients that clean their plates and come back for more, and you want to be able to successfully serve them when they do.

Cook

Although you might be a great cook, you mustn’t rest on your laurels. A successful food business will require you to challenge yourself and improve all the time. You may also need to hire staff at some stage. This is one of the most difficult and important tasks of a small business owner. Great chefs produce great food. Be prepared to nurture them so you can handle other aspects of the business.

Concept

A focused concept is important. Specialising in a particular service helps potential clients quickly grasp what you offer. It also helps you direct your marketing efforts and build your reputation.

Think in terms of food sources, locations, events, meal types – all filtered through your own talents and interests – and potential combinations of these.

Here’s an example of a gourmet catering/private chef business. They started with an interest in hog roasts. This led to the following notes as they worked up their business idea:

• Experience: hog roasts
• Locations: outdoor, BBQs
• Ethnic variations: Southeast Asia, Italian, South American/Peruvian
• Events: weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, funerals
• Other possibilities: sandwiches for offices, cafés

Research

“When I walk into my kitchen today, I am not alone. Whether we know it or not, none of us is. We bring fathers and mothers and kitchen tables, and every meal we have ever eaten. Food is never just food. It’s also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.”

– Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table (2009)

Researching the market to find and test your business ideas is vital. “Just because you cook it, it does not mean that they will come,” warns Olga Astaniotis of The Olive Grows, a company offering start-up companies kitchen space and business advice.

“The subjective opinions of your friends and family and even the uniqueness of your product do not necessarily equate to a brilliant business idea that you are equipped to execute.”

You will need to make some very smart decisions throughout your business life. Especially in the business’s early days. This starts with research.

First steps

Here are ten places to start finding and testing your ideas for a food business.

1. Ask your local deli or farm shop what they would like to see on their shelves.
2. Social media – get on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and ask people what they’re interested in. Upload photos and videos of different food ideas you’ve had and see which get the warmest response.
3. The media: TV, magazines and newspapers are a good indication of current food trends. Listen to The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4, and check out great food bloggers.
4. How can you im...