Starting food product business

[Wombat]

Hi, I'm starting this thread for accountability and so others can learn from my journey's ups and downs. Thanks for reading and for any feedback!

Quick intro: I'm married, two kids. The slow lane has been OK for providing for my family, but it's slowly smothering me. MJ's books have been an eye-opener and I've been consuming this forum to reset my worldview while making notes from the goldmine of progress threads. Time to start producing.

I've been going around in circles trying to come up with an idea. I admit I must be a bit stupid as it has taken months, but finally it's clicked that I should focus on a person type to serve: people who are on a particular restrictive diet to resolve some health issues. I'm one of those people, so I've been looking at my own experience of diet pain points as a place to start, and grouping them under three main groups:

• Social isolation - there's not many foods that cater to the diet and friends/family just don't get that your food options are restricted. Celebrations are especially difficult.
• Lack of convenience - sometimes I'm too tired to build meals from scratch, or I forgot to make lunch and now I'm stuck at work etc and hungry.
• Cravings - dietary restrictions suck and some things that I really like are just not on the market in a diet compliant form.

My take away: Products serve people, so first work out who the person to serve is. If I can empathise with their pain points, ways to serve them will become apparent.

Progress: I'm just starting out. So far I've read food-item TFF execution threads. I've signed up to Facebook groups, forums etc to see what other people on the diet are complaining about (similar to my issues). I've found some research papers/reports investigating why people have trouble complying with the diet long term (duh - it is so restrictive and inconvenient they would rather have the health issues).

This week I'm looking at whether it's possible to reduce the amount of the problem substances in certain food ingredients. I've done some chemistry at Uni so I've a few ideas - I doubt they would be cost-effective, but I think it is worth quickly looking into. I'm also going to do a survey of what diet compliant products are available and what value skews might be possible on them. I've also thought of a possible food. Australia is isolated at the end of a very long supply chain so I'll order ingredients now to test next week.

Thanks for reading!

 

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[Trismigistus]

Hi, I'm starting this thread for accountability and so others can learn from my journey's ups and downs. Thanks for reading and for any feedback!

Quick intro: I'm married, two kids. The slow lane has been OK for providing for my family, but it's slowly smothering me. MJ's books have been an eye-opener and I've been consuming this forum to reset my worldview while making notes from the goldmine of progress threads. Time to start producing.

I've been going around in circles trying to come up with an idea. I admit I must be a bit stupid as it has taken months, but finally it's clicked that I should focus on a person type to serve: people who are on a particular restrictive diet to resolve some health issues. I'm one of those people, so I've been looking at my own experience of diet pain points as a place to start, and grouping them under three main groups:

• Social isolation - there's not many foods that cater to the diet and friends/family just don't get that your food options are restricted. Celebrations are especially difficult.
• Lack of convenience - sometimes I'm too tired to build meals from scratch, or I forgot to make lunch and now I'm stuck at work etc and hungry.
• Cravings - dietary restrictions suck and some things that I really like are just not on the market in a diet compliant form.

My take away: Products serve people, so first work out who the person to serve is. If I can empathise with their pain points, ways to serve them will become apparent.

Progress: I'm just starting out. So far I've read food-item TFF execution threads. I've signed up to Facebook groups, forums etc to see what other people on the diet are complaining about (similar to my issues). I've found some research papers/reports investigating why people have trouble complying with the diet long term (duh - it is so restrictive and inconvenient they would rather have the health issues).

This week I'm looking at whether it's possible to reduce the amount of the problem substances in certain food ingredients. I've done some chemistry at Uni so I've a few ideas - I doubt they would be cost-effective, but I think it is worth quickly looking into. I'm also going to do a survey of what diet compliant products are available and what value skews might be possible on them. I've also thought of a possible food. Australia is isolated at the end of a very long supply chain so I'll order ingredients now to test next week.

Thanks for reading!

Nice hustle, I hope your idea pans out.

 

[Oilman]

I'm trying to do something of this nature. I think the challenge initially is getting the first clientele. I've tried cold emailing, I've tried building up social media content.

I listen to feedback and I think the biggest one on the social media part is I need to have a profile pic, bio, and good thumbnails.

Then the next challenge is making sure they are repeat. Just take it from someone who's sort of near where you are, it's difficult. But being a slow laner sucks and you don't want to do that long term.

 

[Wombat]

I'm trying to do something of this nature. I think the challenge initially is getting the first clientele. I've tried cold emailing, I've tried building up social media content.

I listen to feedback and I think the biggest one on the social media part is I need to have a profile pic, bio, and good thumbnails.

Then the next challenge is making sure they are repeat. Just take it from someone who's sort of near where you are, it's difficult. But being a slow laner sucks and you don't want to do that long term.

Hey Oilman, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
It sounds like you're a little ahead of me. I haven't even thought of marketing yet (I'm a complete newbie).
I have been reading Ryan Moran's 12 months to 1 million. He seemed to have some good tips on building a social media following to become the first product customers (assuming you are selling D2C).

Yep, I agree slow lane is OK for putting bread on the table short term, while sucking long term. It's not how I want to keep living, that's for sure.

 

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[Wombat]

Last week goals:

• Check whether it's possible to reduce the amount of the problem substances in certain food ingredients. DONE
• Do a survey of what diet compliant products are available and what value skews might be possible on them. DONE
• I've also thought of a possible food. Australia is isolated at the end of a very long supply chain so I'll order ingredients now to test next week. DONE

Progress:
I'm pretty happy with my progress over the week - especially as the kids are on school holidays so on my work-from-home days I'm with them and working late on my slowlane job in the evenings.

From my survey of commercial alternatives to my product idea, and from tasting a few of them, I found they sucked: either very artificial or their taste/texture etc was a poor cousin of the real deal.
The literature suggests it isn't going to be possible to reduce the problem substances in ingredients - at least not in anything like a cost effective way. So I'll have to figure out how to create similar flavours/characteristics from other ingredients.
From papers giving chemical analysis of the ingredients, I think it should be possible to put together something better from natural sources.

I was idly YouTubing keywords related to the idea and found from an unexpected source a recipe mimicking a key related ingredient. I modified it to use my ingredient and I think it's a good starting point. I made multiple batches, tweaking it each time. It has a lot of the characteristics I'm looking for but has a bit of a nasty aftertaste. Another literature search identified the cause of that and I think there might be some work arounds.

My take away:
If the product can be made from natural ingredients and have the right characteristics, that would be a real value skew compared to what is on the market at the moment.

Goals for the next week:

• Keep working on the prototype to work around the current aftertaste.
• Order a small distillation kit as I suspect I'll need some distilled extracts in future (since it takes a while to get things delivered here, to keep moving forward I have to order in advance)

 

[Wombat]

Last week goals:

• Keep working on the prototype to work around the current aftertaste. Done
• Order a small distillation kit as I suspect I'll need some distilled extracts in future (since it takes a while to get things delivered here, to keep moving forward I have to order in advance) Done

Progress:
I've solved the bitter aftertaste problem. I'll have to test the prototype with outsiders, but I gave it to my kids and they loved it (and stole the excess that I'd been keeping to give to someone else).

I've started thinking of how the product recipe can be changed to make it shelf-stable. The book "The food business toolkit for entrepreneurs" by Rachel Zemser has a lot of good detail on those topics. (Basically I now get why so many products are full of salt, sugar and sh*t - regulations favour 'safe' over 'healthy/real'). She also covers working with co-packers for producing the product.

I need to start thinking of getting product feedback. Initially, I'll just test it on average people at a farmer's market (i.e. people that aren't on the diet) as the product needs to be tasty anyway if it is going to be successful. That market will be just giving out free samples and asking for feedback - there's no point trying to sell the product as it is a emulation of an existing diet-non-compliant product, so people not on the diet have no incentive to search for an alternative. If I get positive results, then I can think about more specific testing on the diet user group.

The food laws here mean I'll have to rent a commercial kitchen and take basic food safety classes before giving out samples.

Goals for the next week:

• Determine how to make the prototype shelf-stable.
• Find out how to get into a farmer's market
• Find out commercial food kitchen options near me

 

[Trismigistus]

Last week goals:

• Keep working on the prototype to work around the current aftertaste. Done
• Order a small distillation kit as I suspect I'll need some distilled extracts in future (since it takes a while to get things delivered here, to keep moving forward I have to order in advance) Done

Progress:
I've solved the bitter aftertaste problem. I'll have to test the prototype with outsiders, but I gave it to my kids and they loved it (and stole the excess that I'd been keeping to give to someone else).

I've started thinking of how the product recipe can be changed to make it shelf-stable. The book "The food business toolkit for entrepreneurs" by Rachel Zemser has a lot of good detail on those topics. (Basically I now get why so many products are full of salt, sugar and sh*t - regulations favour 'safe' over 'healthy/real'). She also covers working with co-packers for producing the product.

I need to start thinking of getting product feedback. Initially, I'll just test it on average people at a farmer's market (i.e. people that aren't on the diet) as the product needs to be tasty anyway if it is going to be successful. That market will be just giving out free samples and asking for feedback - there's no point trying to sell the product as it is a emulation of an existing diet-non-compliant product, so people not on the diet have no incentive to search for an alternative. If I get positive results, then I can think about more specific testing on the diet user group.

The food laws here mean I'll have to rent a commercial kitchen and take basic food safety classes before giving out samples.

Goals for the next week:

• Determine how to make the prototype shelf-stable.
• Find out how to get into a farmer's market
• Find out commercial food kitchen options near me

This is awesome and inspiring thanks for posting

 

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[Wombat]

I've been quiet on this thread the last few weeks. I'd made a rough road-map of steps I'd need to take to bring this idea to fruition. After seeing it laid out like that, I realised there's some low-hanging fruit I can go for that will bring in a bit of money, at the cost of not being as CENTS aligned as my main idea.
I've been debating whether such a detour would actually be helpful, or if it is just 'shiny object syndrome' and a distraction. I've concluded the detour will help as it will develop skills I'm going to need for getting the food product to market. As it is simpler, there will be a faster feedback loop which will help me learn. I think the speed will also help keep me motivated as I'll quickly be able to see the results of my actions. The cost estimate is much lower too. I must admit I'm not as personally interested in the detour compared to the food product so I'm treating it as a kind of 'training program' for skilling up. Overall though, I think it de-risks my journey so I'm going for it. I'm putting this thread into hibernation for the moment and will start a new thread for the detour.