Building any business takes a lot of work, and food businesses have a few unique concerns. Whether you’re running a professional kitchen in a restaurant or making treats to sell online, these are some helpful tips to help you succeed.
Focus On Your Product And Keep It Simple
Get busy in your kitchen and make up some small batches of your product. Go out and get people trying your goods. Product is the king, so you need to spend the least possible time developing the rest, such as your branding, packaging, or IP protection. Keep all this simple for now, such as using matte stand up pouches, and remember you can reconsider all these things when your product is perfected.
These things are important, but they aren’t your priority at the beginning. When you start, you also don’t need an expensive commercial kitchen to start with, or lots of professional tools. You need to determine whether you can make a product that people actually want before you worry about anything else.
Mobile food ordering platform
If you’re looking for a way to take your business to the next level, partnering with a mobile food ordering platform is a great option.
By partnering with mobile food ordering platforms, you can let your customers order their favorite food without ever having to leave your site. This is a great way to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as boost sales.
In addition, mobile food ordering platforms can provide you with valuable insights into your customers’ ordering habits. This information can help you optimize your menu and make better decisions about what items to offer.
Mobile food ordering platforms like Mr Yum are a great way to take your business to the next level. By partnering with one of these platforms, you can offer your customers a convenient, hassle-free way to order their favorite food.
Start Selling From Day One And Ask For Feedback
The best and only way to validate your product is through sales. Start with the easiest option; your friends and family, colleagues, and neighbors. These are the best early testers for your product. Once you have made something that people like, get a stall at a local market to scale your test by selling your products to as many strangers as possible.
Get Obsessed With Gathering Data
Data is your main tool for making informed decisions about your business. Ask all the people who try your product for the email address. Build a simple survey and send this out to all the people who have tried your product. This is the only way that you can make sure you can improve your product by capturing their feedback.
Usually, tech people are pretty knowledgeable about collecting data. If you have a tech-savvy friend, ask them for their help and advice.
Review Feedback And Be Ready To Go Back To The Drawing Board
You need a thick skin for any business, so make you are prepared not to take things personally and be completely open during this process. Your product and business might be your baby, but in order to succeed, you need to develop a product that people love and more importantly want to keep buying. Once you have a new and improved version of your products, send or give it to all your customers and ask them for more feedback. You need to be prepared to lose money to make money. Send out samples, attend events to learn from fellow entrepreneurs, and use every opportunity you have to tell your story.
Success Is Selling And Building Your Own Tribe
Embracing selling early on is very important. Understandably, most food entrepreneurs feel at their most comfortable in their kitchen, but with no sales, they just can’t keep producing their products. Ultimately, you are the best person to sell your product. If you think about it, nobody knows the recipe, how good your ingredients are that you have put in it, and so on, better than you do.
It’s never too early to start building your community, so make a start on the following:
- Collect connect details from all of your beta testers or any person who gets to try your products
- Open a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram page for your business and use it to show your progress
- Focus on building your community and foster it day after day with tons of content, such as pictures of your latest batch of treats, quotes from friends, articles with the latest industry trends, or interviews with your favorite entrepreneur
You might be surprised about how active and engaged people will become when you keep them updated with fresh content on your social media channels every day.
There are some additional things that you can consider too, especially for those who are developing consumer package goods:
- Think about scale and COGs (cost of goods) early on. To successfully approach retailers you will need to have a decent manufacturing capacity, at least to fulfill their orders, and can offer interesting margins to list your products
- Don’t try to create a lot of new categories or rush into very new areas of business. It is a lot easier to improve your products within already established categories than try to create new ones. Try to leverage the big guys’ publicity in your favor, as educating consumers is usually very expensive.
