Bring Your Fresh Ideas to Market and Profit Fueled by growing consumer demand for new tastes, cleaner ingredients, health benefits, and more convenient ways to shop and eat, the business of specialty food is taking off at full speed. This step-by-step guide arms entrepreneurial foodies like yourself with an industry overview of market trends, useful research for your marketing plan, and insight from practicing specialty food business owners. Determine your key growth drivers, opportunities, and how you can differentiate from other food businesses. Discover how to: Find the right avenue for your specialty food business: home-based, retail shop, production, wholesale, or distribution Create a solid business plan, get funded, and get the essential equipment Get the right licenses, codes, permits, insurance for your operations Gain a competitive edge using market and product research Find a profitable location, partnerships, and in-store shelf space Promote your business, products, and services online and offline Attract new and loyal customers using social media platforms to build your community of foodie fans. Manage daily operations, costs, and employees Plus, get valuable resource lists, sample business plans, checklists, and worksheets

A comprehensive guide to planning, preparing, marketing, and selling gourmet foods for the takeout market, a natural extension for caterers, food retail stores, and restaurants. This book discusses everything from planning to opening and operating, designing a "store" concept, setting up displays, marketing the food, equiping the kitchen and display area, and training sales and kitchen staff.

For those ready to follow their foodie dreams (or at least start thinking about it), this book provides the tools to decide if creating a specialty food business is right for you. Whether the goal is selling a single product online or developing a range of gourmet foods for grocery chains, this handbook helps hopeful food entrepreneurs become experts in everything from concept and production to sales and marketing. The author uses real-life examples from more than 75 successful individuals and businesses to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of starting a food enterprise, providing links to useful charts and worksheets to simplify the process and keep entrepreneurs organized and focused.

Each chapter takes the reader step-by-step through everything needed to get a small food business up and running including: business plans; obtaining licenses and registering the business; understanding costs and pricing; marketing and branding; and developing business tools to track finances.

Many small food business owners dream of seeing their products on store shelves, but how to get onto those shelves is a mystery. Focused specifically on specialty food businesses that don't have millions of marketing dollars at their disposal, this book unravels that mystery for food entrepreneurs, offering tactical tips, insight, and short stories of entrepreneurs who have been in your place and succeeded. Topics include: * Understanding the wholesale industry and the roles that brokers and distributors play * Pricing products appropriately so that you can grow and make money * In-depth insight into a variety of wholesale food channels, covering what you need to know and how you should approach specialty stores, supermarkets, club stores, and even food service and hospitality * How and why you should support your retailers to ensure you stay on the shelf * Information on labeling regulations and packaging guidelines to ensure your product gets noticed by customers and conforms with FDA requirements * Definitions and explanations of common wholesale and promotional terminology * Creating sales sheets that help your product sell-and samples to help guide you * The role trade shows play and how to make the most of them

Stories and advice for creating a business out of the food you love. Do you have a passion for delicious food and want to create your own business out of it, but have no idea where to start? Cooking Up a Business is essential reading for aspiring entrepreneurs and gives you a real-world, up-close-and-personal preview of the exciting journey. Through profiles and interviews with nationally known food entrepreneurs from Popchips, Vosges Haut-Chocolat, Hint Water, Mary’s Gone Crackers, Love Grown Foods, Kopali Organics, Tasty, Evol, Justin’s Nut Butters, Cameron Hughes Wine, and more, you will gain applicable, practical guidance that teaches you how to succeed today: • How to create a national brand—with no connections or experience • The secret to getting meetings with grocery store buyers • The number one thing you need to know about food safety regulations • Why a grassroots budget might actually help you succeed • Specific advice for gluten-free, organic, wine, and beverage companies • What every entrepreneur wishes someone had told them at the beginning • Why doing what you love is always a good idea

Are you one of the many people who dream of making a profit selling your own homemade foods? Now, with this one-of-a-kind, easy-to-follow guide, you can realize your home-based food business dreams! With over 30 years' experience, author Mimi Shotland Fix takes you step-by-step through the process of starting and running a food business.Whether you've always envisioned yourself with a home-based food business, need a second source of income or want to stay at home and be your own boss, Start & Run a Home-Based Food Business offers dozens of tips, examples and advice for you to run a profitable business from your own kitchen! The bonus download kit features resources and forms in PDF and MS Word formats. This includes: lists of books, websites and trade magazines, national and regional suppliers, sample contracts, invoices and accounting forms, tried-and-true recipes, and more!

Master the essentials needed to start a restaurant. Features proffesional advice, sample business plan, revenue forecasting, organization tips, financial advice, location selection, leasing tips, negotiation tips, business checklist, and more!

How to start, grow, and succeed in the food truck business. Food trucks have become a wildly popular and important part of the hospitality industry. Consumers are flocking to these mobile food businesses in droves, inspiring national food truck competitions and even a show dedicated to the topic on The Food Network. The relatively low cost of entry as compared to starting a restaurant, combined with free and low-cost ways to market them to the masses via platforms like social media, are just two of the reasons that food truck business are drawing in budding entrepreneurs. Author David Weber, a food truck advocate and entrepreneur himself, is here to offer his practical, step-by-step advice to achieving your mobile food mogul dreams in The Food Truck Handbook. This book cuts through all of the hype to give both hopeful entrepreneurs and already established truck owners an accurate portrayal of life on the streets. From concept to gaining a loyal following to preventative maintenance on your equipment this book covers it all. Includes profiles of successful food trucks, detailing their operations, profitability, and scalability. Establish best practices for operating your truck using one-of-a-kind templates for choosing vending locations, opening checklist, closing checklist, and more. Create a sound business plan complete with a reasonable budget and finding vendors you can trust; consider daily operations in detail from start to finish, and ultimately expand your business. Stay lean and profitable by avoiding the most common operating mistakes. Author David Weber is Founder and President of the NYC Food Truck Association (NYCFTA), which brings together small businesses that own and operate premium food trucks in NYC focused on innovation in hospitality, high quality food, and community development.

This report is part of a multi-volume technical report series entitled, Running a Food Hub, with this guide serving as a companion piece to other United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports by providing in-depth guidance on starting and running a food hub enterprise. In order to compile the most current information on best management and operations practices, the authors used published information on food hubs, surveyed numerous operating food hubs, and pulled from their existing experience and knowledge of working directly with food hubs across the country as an agricultural business consulting firm. The report’s main focus is on the operational issues faced by food hubs, including choosing an organizational structure, choosing a location, deciding on infrastructure and equipment, logistics and transportation, human resources, and risks. As such, the guide explores the different decision points associated with the organizational steps for starting and implementing a food hub. For some sections, sidebars provide “decision points,” which food hub managers will need to address to make key operational decisions. This illustrated guide may assist the operational staff at small businesses or third-party organizations that may provide aggregation, marketing, and distribution services from local and regional producers to assist with wholesale, retail, and institution demand at government institutions, colleges/universities, restaurants, grocery store chains, etc. Undergraduate students pursuing coursework for a bachelor of science degree in food science, or agricultural economics may be interested in this guide. Additionally, this reference work will be helpful to small businesses within the food trade discipline.