eBook - ePub
Homemade for Sale
How to Set Up and Market a Food Business from Your Home Kitchen
John D. Ivanko, Lisa Kivirist
This is a test
Share book
- 240 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Homemade for Sale
How to Set Up and Market a Food Business from Your Home Kitchen
John D. Ivanko, Lisa Kivirist
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
- Homemade for Sale is the most comprehensive and accessible reference guide for home cooks unacquainted with the operation of a small business. It also provides more detailed information for business-savvy food entrepreneurs
- As the first authoritative guide to launching a successful food enterprise operated specifically from your home kitchen, Homemade for Sale provides a clear roadmap to go from idea and recipe to final product
- Homemade for Sale will feature "story profiles" of cottage food start-ups addressing real life challenges while sharing practical advice and opportunities
- Widely known as "cottage food legislation," over 42 states and various Canadian provinces currently have varying forms of laws that encourage home cooks to create and sell to the public specific, "non-hazardous" food items
- Every major cottage food category and direct sales channel will be represented, including decorative cookies, wedding cakes, pickles, preserves, cookies and salsas
- From slow food to fancy food, from farm-to-fork to hand-made artisan breads, more people than ever are demanding real food made with real ingredients by real people â not by machines in factories
- Homemade for Sale gets you started, organized and cooking for your customers, creating items that by their very nature are small batch, fresh, unique and specialized
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Homemade for Sale an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Homemade for Sale by John D. Ivanko, Lisa Kivirist in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Small Business. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
SECTION 2
Selling Your Story: Marketing
4
Product Development: Design, Name, Logo and Packaging
A WIDE RANGE OF DIFFERENT ELEMENTS go into defining a great product, including the uniqueness of your recipe, the quality of the ingredients, the packaging, perhaps the specific process of its artisanal, small-batch production and, even, the messaging youâve created around your product.
As we touched on earlier, marketing is a term that covers a wide range of considerations associated with selling your homemade item. Most business schools cover the 4 Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place (how you distribute your item) and Promotion, both in the form of paid advertising and âfreeâ public relations.
We explore three additional Ps in our ECOpreneuring book, in part because marketing has become so pervasive and integrated into day-to-day routines, often in subtle or clever ways. It permeates our life through product placement in movies, naming rights for stadiums or campus buildings, Facebook updates or reviews on Yelp. These additional 3 extra Ps of marketing â People, Partnerships and Purpose â reflect our values and belief systems and connect us to our community.
Because marketing plays such a pivotal role in the success of any product, weâve broken the 7 Ps of marketing down into several chapters. Realize, however, that the most effective marketing efforts are those that combine all seven elements into one cohesive, integrated and clear plan that can be effectively implemented.
Niche, Target and Positioning
Before getting into the product aspect of marketing, weâll touch on three very important concepts first: finding your niche, defining your target market and positioning your product.
Finding a Niche with Potential
Nearly all food businesses, large and small, assess potential markets, carving out a niche that seems most likely to earn enough money by selling a product to make it worth pursuing. If you donât make some profit, at least three out of five years, youâre not in business, according to the IRS; youâre just a hobby. Weâll cover this more in Chapter 12.
A niche is a segment of a broader market where you believe your product can do well. Because of your productâs unique characteristics, better quality or because it faces little competition, you may find greater flexibility in terms of how you market and sell it. Remember, if you define your niche too narrowly, or if there arenât enough customers who want what you make at the price for which youâre selling it, then this niche doesnât have the market potential to make your business viable. Donât throw in the towel, just re-evaluate your goals and examine ways to expand your market without being everything to everyone.
Defining Your Target Market
While a niche is often product-focused, your target market is the audience or potential customers you want to reach, serve and satisfy with your products. The 7 Ps of marketing are guided or defined by who you select as the target market. In other words, the customers most likely to purchase your products in a large enough quantity at the price youâve determined will allow your business to prosper.
There are a number of ways you can define your target market:
â˘By demographics: age, gender, geography and income level, among many other variables
Example: ages 30â40, female, living in Smalltown, New York, earning $50,000 to $100,000/year
â˘By psychographics: attitudes, beliefs and value systems
Example: a Cultural Creative âlocavoreâ who loves artisanal food products, especially those that are organic and made without preservatives. Different from Traditionals and Moderns, Cultural Creatives are more attuned to environmental and social issues.
Youâll need to define and understand your customers in both demographic and psychographic ways. Think about it this way: demographics help you understand who your customers are while psychographics help determine why your customers buy what they do. Keep in mind that the needs of your customers may not even be real; they could just be perceived. In other words, your customers may not even know they need your product, even if they do. Think: impulse purchases. From this information, you can then develop your marketing strategy, and from that, a marketing plan that addresses those 7 Ps.
Due to your familiarity with and assessment of the marketplace, you may already have a solid grasp of who would buy your products. Youâll probably start by selling to neighbors, family or friends already clamoring for your products. Maybe they attend the same church, work in the same office or school, serve in the same civic organizations or attend the same youth soccer games. This works great until you find yourself wanting to sell more products and ramp up your operations to reach customers beyond your immediate network. At that point, youâll need to flush out the target market more thoroughly if your marketing efforts are to be effective.
âHomemadeâ is the buzzword that CFOs celebrate with authenticity and pride. JOHN D. IVANKO
Positioning Your Product
In marketing jargon, the expression of differentiation is called positioning: the combination of marketing elements that go into defining your product. Defining exactly how your product might appeal to your customers in terms of their needs or desires and the benefits it provides can be tricky. While you may believe you have the most unique and tasty fruit-flavored graham crackers ever, in the end, your potential customers need to share this perception and feel that it meets their needs as a healthy snack (assuming thatâs one of the benefits of your product). Product development research and a market feasibility study, covered in Chapter 9, guide this process.
Positioning can consider all 7 Ps of marketing, plus how your product might be used or the solution to a problem it addresses. Often, positioning can involve a combination of several variables. For example, your sugar-free sweet rolls could be a solution as a breakfast item for customers seeking ways to cut back on their sugar. Or that same sugar-free roll could be a delicious and healthier way to savor a snack, perhaps with a cup or coffee or tea.
Keep in mind that thereâs a big difference between being product-focused and market-focused, especially if your aim might be to scale up your operations. The market â your customers â are the ones telling you what they want, what benefits they perceive, what problem is being solved, or what needs are being met with your product. Are gluten-free breads absent in your community? Is a well-attended local arts show missing a food vendor, with hungry art shoppers with no place to go for a snack?
With positioning, youâre conveying what your product is, how itâs different from the competition and why a customer should buy it from you. One route to success may be to come up with a âsignatureâ product, something unique. Perhaps itâs your uncommonly good approach to a common recipe. Bonus points for being clever, creative or distinctive in describing it. Even when you have no competition for your product, its taste will ultimately determine whether customers come back for more.
What youâre actually selling could be much more than just the taste, flavor, texture, size or appearance of your food product. If you package or distribute it as a gift for tourists or the holiday season, your approach will be far different than if it was a product offered at a farmersâ market. Depending on your item, you may even offer some form of service, like a guarantee of satisfaction.
For example, a Swiss-style cookie sold in a Swiss community with lots of tourist traffic might be positioned as an edible gift or a souvenir. The name, packaging, price and label should aid in this by eliciting a clear and prompt âI should try this now!â thought in a potential customerâs mind while theyâre browsing the arts and crafts fair where youâve set up a small stand.
Price can appeal to a customer on a limited budget, or deter an upscale clientele who might happily pay a premium for an item with high-quality ingredients or fresh from the oven. For many impulse purchases, convenience, comfort or hunger may drive the exchange; customers may pay a premium for any one of these qualities. How your product is different can take interesting forms; perhaps you deliver by bicycle. For example, Dominoâs Pizza, the national pizza chain, is famously known for being in the delivery business, not the pizza business. Thatâs how they do pizza different.
Depending on your marketing strategy, you m...