Iced Tea Small High School Business

[EmperorWulf]

Hi there!

As a high school student and MJ DeMarco fan, listening to the Millionaire Fastlane inspired me to think of starting a simple business involving creating and selling homemade iced tea in my school cafeteria, and eventually the local area because where I live, juices and other non-water drinks sell like crazy since in the country where I currently live, alcohol is a cultural thing, so kids and teenagers tend to have a preference for more sugary drinks growing up.

Iced tea is a drink I don't see being sold here so I'm tapping into this, fulfilling the commandment of need in the local market I'm aiming for, while introducing a novel, interesting product for them as a value skew.

Back in home country, papa used to be an entrepreneur, manufacturing and selling his own brand of juice that blew up regionally in the 90s, and he helped me with conceptualizing and coming up with the recipe for this idea, so I confidently have high hopes for this pitch.

It's a straightforward recipe (literally three ingredients) so it's pretty simple to produce, unless it sells hand over fist where I'd need to scale somehow (low population, it's hard to find people here for scaling operations). But even then, bottling this is also a simple process that doesn't use too much braincells.

*something like these


Things to consider:

1. There's a bunch of regulations and other stuff. I talked with a friend of mine at school who runs wholesaling, and he suggested that a good milestone would be to get a certification from the local diabetes association. He also said to ensure it has proper nutrition facts. Not sure as to whether he meant that the tea has to comply with some standards, or just to simply have the nutrition facts printed on the label, or both. Either way I gotta know how to get those sorted out. Also, I probably need those food cards/badges that the food vans have.
2. Hard to scale. I live in a small country, so finding people will be difficult in the event that the business somehow blows up and decides to expand. I may sound too ambitious for something so rudimentary like an iced tea business, but tbh I'm just really confident about this idea.
3. Limited capital. Certain things are eventually gonna have to be done but will cost (like chemicals to prolong its shelf life, opting for artificial tea-flavored chemicals instead for producing more, or maybe even using costly but biodegradable bottles as another value skew).
4. Commandment of Time. I have school and both my parents work. As mentioned before, finding people is also difficult, so fulfilling the time-part of the CENTS framework is basically impossible given the current circumstances, and is the biggest hurdle for this business.

TL;DR: Thinking of starting an iced tea business at my high school since it's an untapped market where I live, and sugary drinks have high demand. If successful, considering regional expansion. Sounds like a great idea that would sell bank. Certain limitations to consider.

Feedback would be highly appreciated, happy holidays !

 

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[kr8nt]

Don't wait for anything, the sooner you start the sooner you will find out whether this is a good idea or not. You are still in school, which means that you most probably have a ton of free time that you can use to test this idea ASAP. Life isn't going to wait, and at some point you won't have as much free time and it will be much harder to find time for testing ideas.

Don't worry about all of that regulatory stuff for now, no one will say anything if you sell a couple iced tea's.