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Standing Out Without Cutting Your Price The numbers don’t look good this month. Your costs keep climbing while the supermarket down the street sells knockoffs of your products at rock-bottom prices. Your hands grip the edge of your desk as you wonder if it’s time to slash your own prices to stay alive. beyond the…
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Starting a food business comes with big dreams. But here’s something you won’t often hear: food business success might mean earning $65,000 a year while keeping your sanity intact. It means having enough in the bank to fix that mixer when it breaks and not panicking when a big client pays two weeks late. Finding…
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Have you set your food business pricing strategically or emotionally? Many specialty food businesses in Los Angeles and beyond set their prices emotionally, not strategically. As a result, producers often focus on basic ingredients when calculating food manufacturing costs while overlooking overhead. Ultimately, this approach to product pricing doesn’t just hurt your profits – it…
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investing Beyond the Kitchen Counter Making amazing granola, hot sauce, or pickles isn’t enough anymore. The hard truth is that lots of people make great food. How they connect with their customers sets successful small food businesses apart. Think about this: when someone buys your jam at a farmers’ market, are they just buying jam?…
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Failure: Getting Back Up When Things Go Wrong in Your Food Business Every food business hits rough patches. Maybe your new product flopped, your costs got out of hand, or your customers just aren’t buying. While failure feels awful, it can teach valuable lessons. Here’s a simple guide to bouncing back. Turn Your Problems into…
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First, The Hard Truth about your business Look, I know you’re doing everything in your food business yourself—the accounting, the social media, the label design, the inventory counts—on top of actually making your product. And I bet you’re exhausted. What’s Really Going On Meanwhile, when most food makers talk about outsourcing these tasks, they get…
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I get it. Your small food business is your baby. You’ve perfected your recipes, built your brand, and found your groove. But here’s the thing: the market doesn’t care about your comfort zone. The food industry moves fast. Standing still is the same as moving backward, and that means you’re relevance is at risk. The…
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The Pressure to Expand Everyone will tell you that your food business needs to get bigger. They’ll say you should sell in more stores, make more products, and hire more people. If there’s no growth, people might think you’re doing something wrong. The Hidden Cost of Rapid Growth But here’s the truth: staying small can…
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Is It Time? You’ve been juggling your food business with everything else—work, life, sleep (when you can). It’s exciting, but it’s exhausting. Maybe the orders are piling up, or you’re daydreaming about what your business could become if you had more time. But is now the right moment to go full-time? Follow the Numbers This…
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After being laid off from my job in financial services, I seriously considered starting a food business. Although I had several products I wanted to make and sell, my research around LA led to a sobering realization: I was going to fail. Not because my ideas weren’t good enough, but because I couldn’t find a…
