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it’s hard to hold yourself accountable when you’re going it alone Running a food business can feel lonely. When you’re making granola, bottling hot sauce, or packaging meal kits yourself, there’s no one there to tell you if your ideas make sense. Independence is great – it’s probably why you started your business. But being…
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If your homemade goodies are flying off the shelves and you’re ready to level up production, congratulations! Scaling up can be exciting—and a little daunting. The biggest challenge? Making sure your recipe works just as well in large batches as it does in small ones. Here’s a straightforward guide to recipe scaling so you can…
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You have your product idea and a plan to produce it. Let’s use hot sauce as an example. Your product is on the shelf with many other brands and different varieties within those brands. To illustrate, as a consumer, there are so many different hot sauces to choose from. You need sales. How are you…
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What’s the difference between margins and mark-ups? Which do you use, and when? Simply stated if you’re a packaged food/taxable grocery brand, you should use margin, not mark up. Why? Because that’s what stores, and distributors and brokers and wholesale buyers use. You need to be speaking their language, because when a business analyzes their…
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Over and over, when approaching new wholesale buyers, new food businesses (and existing!) make easily correctable tactical errors. Here are the top 6 sales pitfalls: As the founder, you’re excited to get a new account. That’s understandable. Saying “yes” to accounts that are outside your region, not aligned with your known target customer, beyond your…
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Drop off, ship or blind deliver? Why do buyers want samples in the first place? And, what do they wish you knew about dropping off samples? Is there a strategy for getting samples to wholesale accounts before they place the first order? Here’s the scenario: You pack up sample with sell sheet and your card…
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What categorizes as wholesale? There’s much confusion here. First, let’s define the terms, then we’ll tackle the question. Wholesale is when you sell your product to another business and they resell it to the end consumer (at a higher price). Ex: You sell your hot sauce to a specialty grocer for $4. They put a…
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If it’s your goal to sell your product, in large quantities, to retailers and distributors, or if you have dreams of getting your product into the hands of more people, let’s get your product ready for wholesale. We’ve seen too many businesses enter the wholesale journey ill-prepared. Ultimately, that does more harm than good. There’s a…
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Wholesalers will ask for a lot (free cases, free fills, etc.) Have you been in negotiations with a new distributor and they’re asking for a 35% margin? Working with a co-packer and they want you to commit to 15,000 cases per run and, based on your data, you know you can’t sell that many units…
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You’re ready to start your packaged food business and now you have a lot of little loose ends to tie up. Let’s talk about profit margins and pricing for profitability. It’s critical to make sure that you price your product for profitability. There are four common mistakes that packaged food business entrepreneurs make when they…
