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Having a food startup is hard but we’re here to help. Whether you’re leaving another career to pursue your passion or you’re a food industry pro looking to start your own brand, we created the ultimate food startup guide with resources for every step of the way.
Food Business Basics
First of all lets get down to basics. Below is a list of articles you can read on starting a food business in all that fictional spare time you have, cause starting a food business isn’t time consuming or anything. Spoiler allert the food classes below cover this information in detail but it boils down to these steps:
Decide your business entity ( sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, etc)
Refine your business concept (this is where those food classes can help)
Decide on a name and get some branding created (logo, colors, look and feel)
Find your price point and define our target market.
Choose how to sell – retail, online, food truck, farmers markets etc.
Create a budget
Write a business plan (see resources below).
Obtain licenses and Permits (the permits you need will be determined by your answer to step 5) The FDA guide below is the most definitive guide.
Before you lay pen to paper and start your business plan (yes you need one of those), you’ll need to do some research and fill in your knowledge gaps. First of all, don’t be afraid to share your startup idea with others because you never know where a great idea or valuable connection might come from. Similarly attending a conference or a class can shift your whole perspective and save you lots of wasted time and money.
Started by The Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the world’s leading not-for-profit food college, Food Business School provides on site and online training for the foodpreneur. They offer 5 week online courses, intensive 1-3 day courses at their facility in Napa Valley or the Bay area, customized experiences for teams, and a hands-on one week accelerator program in food entrepreneurship and innovation mastery. Most noteworthy, their website features Foodbiz+, a monthly program of online conversations with industry experts exploring the latest opportunities and threads in the food business.
This 4-hour seminar in Santa Monica, California will take you through all the steps needed to open a small food business. You will learn the ins and outs of permits; working in a commercial kitchen space; incorporating and trademarking; converting recipes into formulas; what to expect in a commercial kitchen space and how to start selling both wholesale and retail. We give you the tools you’ll need to get started and make ourselves available for assistance along the way.
Providing a range of inspiring, action-oriented food business classes and workshops that provide culinary entrepreneurs and business owners with information they need to succeed – and often feature incredible guest speakers. This New York based group offers many workshops as well as consultation.
These on-demand videos, made specifically for food entrepreneurs about the topics that are important to you, enable you to get the information you need on a schedule that works for you. Stop, start, and rewatch these videos at any time. Above all these classes fit the needs of the busy foodpreneur juggling a day job and a side hustle.
This food and beverage Incubator is in New Jersey with workshops, events and business consulting services. In contrast to the online classes, this provides interaction and face to face learning from industry veterans.
The Food for Profit workshop takes you step by step through the information necessary to start and run a small food product business. These community workshops offered by PennState are inexpensive and in some cases FREE.
Food Business: A Beginnner’s Guide takes you through everything from basic business structures to wholesaling.
Cottage Food Basics
Finally, many states now have cottage food laws on their books allowing you to start your food business from home, avoiding all the costs of using a commercial kitchen. You’ll need to research the laws in your area as they vary by state and even by region. Here some great resources to get you started.
We’ll let you in on a little secret. Nobody wants to create a business plan. It sounds like a term paper in college and everyone would rather just get to work, but sadly you need one. Really truly you need a business plan to get investors, get loans and frankly it will help you towards success. Business plans don’t have to be elaborate and below are some resources to help you through the pain. We feel ya!
Above all getting off the ground takes money. There are experts who will tell you not to borrow a dime and others who will say never use your own money, but ultimately you’ll probably need a little of both. It’s a good idea to get started on your own, using your own savings because investors like when you’ve got some skin in the game. They also like seeing that you’ve already got something going and it’s not such a risk. Here are some resources for when you run out of coins under the couch cushions.
Crowdfunding
Kickstarter is of course the most widely known of the crowd funding options available today, but there are many other options out there for food startup projects. Even more important than what platform you choose though, HOW you go about it makes a big difference. It takes some marketing savvy to have your crowdfunding campaign break through and become a success. You may want to work with a crowdsourcing consultant to get your funding pitch perfect.
A great resource crowdfunding education, training and consulting is Crowdfund Better. Unlike many agencies, they offer convenient and affordable pricing that allows you to pay for just what you need. In the 6 years they have been in business they’ve helped many startups identify the best crowdfunding opportunities and position themselves for successful campaigns.
Pieshell is another great option that specializes in crowdfunding for the food and beverage industry. On a mission to cater to the unique needs of the industry, they have an incubation approach aiming at better results than the meager 25% success rate on other platforms. They make sure you’re set with marketing materials and gifts before you ever launch that campaign and that can be the difference between funded and not.
Similarly Barnraiser is crowdfunding specifically for the food industry. As their title implies they specialize in small batch foods and farms that need small amounts of funding. Need a tractor or a new piece of equipment to make it to the next level? Barnraiser can help with that. Starting a new co-op or a sustainable energy bar that’s a great project for Barnstormer too. The vast majority of their funded projects have goals under $25,000.
Loans
One of the best is Fundera which allows you to compare dozens of loans at once. Here is a host of other lending options for small businesses and startups:
While we’re working on our Ultimate Guide to Food Marketing here are a few resources that we’ve found to help you out. Sign up for updates so you can get the our Food Marketing 101 as soon as it’s ready.
Real Food Brands Podcast – A Marketing podcast for the food and beverage industry by industry consultant, Katie Mleziva.
Influence.co – hire yourself some influencer marketing with this easy search tool.
tribegroup.co – Crowdsource your next influencer marketing campaign
Food News, Associations and Resources
If all this is like drinking from a firehose subscribe to our site and we’ll be doing our best to give you just the highlights from the best of what the food industry news has to offer once a month.
Entrepreneurial Chef Magazine provides news and information specifically for the food industry. We recommend checking out their podcasts and magazine for inspirational and educational articles.
Food Dive – One of the sources we read every day. This is geared towards big packaged goods, not small batch foods. Read our twitter feed and we give you the highlights and show you how they can impact food startups and artisan brands.
Peas On Moss Podcast – Product Development Scientist, Kimberly Schaub, has created a podcast of interviews and information on the food industry.
Branch Food provides New England foodpreneurs with resources to help them grow and thrive.
Botanicals – Plants and flowers are springing up in food and beverage items as more and more consumers are becoming interested in the potential healing benefits of these ingredients. This trend is very exciting because is it very natural, global, clean label and very easily incorporated into chef driven cuisines.
Transparency – This is driven by the consumer demand for more product information, fewer artificial ingredientsand more sustainable production and packaging. It has now extended beyond just clean-labels to include product traceability as shoppers grow more curious on where their food comes from and how it’s handled along the supply chain.
Ethnic Cuisine –Asian and Middle Eastern flavors continue to show more awareness and growth beyond just sushi, tempura, hummus and yogurt. Asian flavors balance the five basic tastes — sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami — while Middle Eastern ones range from spice blends with texture — such as such as za’atar and dukkah — to labna, a softand spreadable cheeses made from strained yogurt. These types of foods allow consumers to travel from the comfort of their own home.
Science-based Foods – Beyond Meat is known for it’s plant-based burgers which are made from pea protein isolate, coconut oil and sunflower oil. The also justrecently launched Beyond Sausage; both are vegetarian product is designed to mimic the flavor, texture and shape of the respective animal-meat item without the hormones, nitrates, soy and gluten. Sales of plant-based foods grew 8.1% during the past year. Nielsen estimated that plant-based meats accounted for 2.1% of sales in refrigerated and frozen meat products sold at retail. Cell-cultured meat also is gaining traction, and tartups have begun to experiment with fish as well as beef and poultry.
Sustainability- This trend has moved beyond recyclable packaging. Consumers are taking a more active role in the battle against food waste, a mindset that is leading many shoppers to try and use all parts of a plant or animal or vegetable, rather than cherry-picking some and throwing the rest away. Also called “root-to-stem” and “nose-to-tail” eating, this expanded type of sustainability is likely to appear equally in meat and produce departments.
Indulgence Foods – Comfort foods containing butter, lard and other fats and oils are hip again. Today’s consumers seem more interested in reducing the amount of sugar and sodium they consume than about the amount of fat in their diet. It noted there is growing awareness “that certain fat and oils can actually make positive health contributions.” Indulgence foods will always fit somewhere within the American diet, since nearly everyone has a tendency to eat food once in a while that isn’t especially nutritious.
Are you using hashtags on your social media posts? You should be! They can be a very powerful tool when used well but it’s hard to know what hashtags to use and how to use them.
Why You Should #ify Your Posts. There are two reasons to use hashtags. The first is to create a unique brand identifier that your followers pick up and repeat. For example #foodbizbuzz. You can then track that hashtag, follow people who use it, comment on their posts etc. The other reason to use a hashtag is to amplify your posts by allowing users to “discover” you. Now that you can follow hashtags on instagram and add them to your business profile (did you know you could do that?) they have because an even more powerful tool.
#Overwhelmed by #choices? The trick is to know what hashtags will actually help you gain any traction. You might be tempted to use the largest hashtags in foods (#foodie for example) thinking the larger the hashtags, the more people are searching for it so the more likely you’ll be seen. It’s a good theory however the problem is that when it’s a super large hashtag your post will be quickly overwhelmed by mega influencers who are using the tag. Because they have more followers and more engagement they will be seen more often. Use hashtags that aren’t huge but aren’t tiny either. You want to be the Goldilocks of social media. Try finding a competitor or influencer doing something similar to what you’re doing and see what tags they are using.
The best strategy for discovery is to use “trending” hashtags in foods. Trending tags are like pop music, they suddenly rise up, sometimes just for a day, and then die down. True to their name, they are a trend. You may want to use them when you need to stay on top of the trends but this can be tough. Pay close attention to things going on in the news, even if it doesn’t have to do with foods, you can certainly find a reason to celebrate #internationalwomensday which was huge this year. Make sure that the hashtag works for your brand and your audience. #420 may work well for your brand if you’re producing something appealing to a millennial crowd like a craft alcohol, but if you’re audience is more conservative you might want to skip that trend.
For those everyday hashtags one of the best things to do is to tag what’s going on in the picture. For example if it’s a shot of pasta with tomatoes and your artisan cheese you’ll add #pasta #cheese #tomatoes and anything else related to the shot for example maybe its a #healthylunch or #vegan.
#Resources We know you have enough on your plate and you probably don’t have the time to be a full time social media guru so we will be posting some helpful tips for trends to jump onto. One thing to be aware of is national food days. We will post all the national days a week ahead on instagram and here so you can stay informed. Be sure to sign up for email updates on this site so you don’t miss our trending tags report or the national food days and much much more.
Here are a few hashtags to use in your posts that are to too big or too small and trending higher. #onthetable #gastropost #foodtravel #foodlovers #food4thought
The demand for better-for-you ingredients and brands continues to be on the rise across the grocery store. Not only is this prevalent in the “healthy” …
Botanicals – Plants and flowers are springing up in food and beverage items as more and more consumers are becoming interested in the potential healing benefits of these ingredients. This trend is very exciting because is it very natural, global, clean label and very easily incorporated into chef driven cuisines.
tartups have begun to experiment with fish as well as beef and poultry.
