Time-to-Market: A Showcase of Local Foods

You are invited to attend one of Portland’s premier foodie event!

Time-to-Market: A Showcase of Local Foods
(http://foodbizstartup.net/events)
6:00 - 9:00 p.m., Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Food Innovation Center Experiment Station
1207 NW Naito Parkway, Portland, OR

Time-to-Market: A Showcase of Local Foods is an opportunity for the public to meet and support local food business entrepreneurs in their first steps to bring their commercial ready product to the retail market. Time-to-Market is a mini-trade show of products developed by food entrepreneurs enrolled in the Getting Your Recipe to Market workshop.

The event is presented by the Portland Community College, Small Business Development Center; the Oregon State University, Food Innovation Center Experiment Station; and the locally-owned New Seasons Market.

Plan to join us for an evening that includes sampling innovative products and networking among local foodies.

For more information contact John Henry Wells at 503-407-6959 or john.wells@northwestfoods.net.

Time-to-Market - Here is how it works?

The Time-to-Market Snapshot shows exactly how the Getting Your Recipe to Market (GYRM) program works. (See photos A, B, C and D in the collage.)

(A) Start with an enthusiastic an passionate individual (in this case Victoria Reynolds) and learn the steps of how to Produce, Promote and Profit as an entrepreneur starting a food business (Victoria was a enrolled in the GYRM session that began Sep 2009)

(B) Present a commercial ready product to the public and event judges at the Time-to-Market event (Victoria presented her commercial ready product - as show - with regulatory compliant labeling, prototype packaging and preliminary branding. Dec 2009)

(C) Win the admiration of peers and local food buyers at the Time-to-Market event. (And continue the hard work of incorporating feedback to refining product branding and develop product positioning. Jan - May 2010)

(D) Delivery to the grocer shelf a finished product “for sale” at a local store (Jun 2010)

If you have a food product idea that you would like to commercialize, the next Getting Your Recipe to Market workshop will begin September 14, 2010. To enroll call John Henry Wells, 503-407-6959. 

Natural Products Expo West - Vitural Review

This past week I attended the Natural Products Expo West held March 11-14, 2010, at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. The expo’s website (http://www.expowest.com) indicated that the event drew nearly 56,000 from across the natural foods and beauty products industry. The Natural Products Expo West (or simply Expo West) is the West coast’s premier trade show for natural food products.

The unusual thing about this Expo West was that I participated without leaving my home office in Portland, Oregon.

Social Networking at Expo West

Twitter is a web-based microblogging service that enables users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based messages up to 140 characters long that are displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. I have been using Twitter for just over a year, and my profile (@foodbizstartup) has nearly 6,500 followers while in turn I am following some 7,000 profiles myself.

Because Twitter can be accessed by text message on smart cell phones, I (and many others) use Twitter as a way to make brief comments (i.e. tweets) about some of the real-time events that are happening in our lives. Tweets can have click-on links as part of the text message and often are written to contain an embedded message know as a hash tag.

A hash tag is text string information in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag.) Within the community of Twitter users, a hash symbol and identifying character string has become as a way marking and indexing a tweet for easy search. In action, a hash tag is a way for people to search for tweets on a common topic.

During Natural Products Expo West, I actively searched for Twitter messages that included the hash tag #expowest; an agreed to nick name to index tweets about the tradeshow. Tweets containing the #expowest (hash tag) then allowed like minded Twitter users to exchange real-time comments about common topics relating to the Expo West show. Twitter users who were walking around the tradeshow in-person and posting messages containing #expowest (and there were a large group of these individuals) became the eyes and ears of Natural Products Expo West posting pictures and messages from their cell phones. (Below are some of the actual tweets from #expowest that summarized my observations of the show. To read more click one each tweet posted with a http link. )

Twitter Reports from #expowest

One highlight of the annual Expo West show, is the presentation of Best of Show products representing notable innovation from across the industry:

For me, the Natural Products Expo West was a great place to learn about some latest trends in natural food as well as a great place to see new products:

By attending the show, I had the opportunity learn some of the most up-to-date information presented by keynote speakers:

Additionally, as with any trade show I have ever attended, I saw exhibitors engaged attendees with product samples and on-site raffles:

Yes, I actually won a gift basket of New Zealand natural products for my efforts of following @NaturalNZinUSA on Twitter (they are mailing me the gift basket). But even at a distance I still an opportunity to revel with others in what I had won:

The show was a great place for vendors to show off their complete product line as well as a place to meet others and develop potential business relationships:

Finally, the show itself yielded insight about the future of the natural foods industry:

Post Script on Social Networking

One of the future trends that more and more companies will be paying attention to in the future is the use of social networking in business-to-business outreach. Here is a final thought about role that Twitter as seen at this year’s Natural Products Expo West :

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Getting Your Recipe to Market

The Getting Your Recipe to Market educational workshop is just as the title implies. A 12-week workshop series designed to engage and coach entrepreneurs along their own Pathway to Commercialization as they move a food product idea (aka recipe)  to a stage of commercial readiness for consumers (aka market).

Each Recipe-to-Market workshop series is concluded with a Time-to-Market event where entrepreneurs present their commercial ready products to the public at a trade fair style event as well as to a team of judges from the local New Seasons Market grocery chain. In many cases, this is the entrepreneurs’ first chance (aka time) to present their products to consumers (aka market) other than close friends and family.

As always, our Time-to-Market event is a lot of fun. The Fall 2009 cohort should be very proud of what they accomplished in the short time of 12 weeks; a result of their personal dedication and focus. We had 12 exhibiting firms at the December, 2009, event.

If you have a food product idea ready to commercialize, the next Getting Your Recipe to Market workshop will begin April 6, 2010. To enroll call John Henry Wells, 503-407-6959. Also, everyone should mark their calendars now for the next Time-to-Market event on June 29, 2010.

Snapshots from the marketplace (picture above clockwise from top-left):

1. Pickled Brussels Sprouts are a niche product;
2. Here is a sampling of local salsas
   (or a response to the previous product);
3. This is NOT a “stock package”;
4. Is it a cookie or a cake?

Business Planning

Food business entrepreneurs will eventually need to develop a business plan. The business plan is a written statement about your business and the goals that you would like to achieve within a specific time frame.

A business plan “Fact Sheet” oriented towards the use of food entrepreneurs is published by the New York State Food Venture Center, Cornell University, and can be found a (http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/necfe/pubs/pdf/FactSheets/FS_BusinessPlanBasics.pdf). The “Fact Sheet” presents a brief overview about what should be included in a business plan and an simple outline format that you can use to start writing your plan on a word processor.

I have found several nice business plan template tools on the web that help to coach you along with questions and more detailed outline structure. These web tools allow you write the tool on line and in one case share information with others.

Here are four online business plan tools that look promising

Fast4Cast Business plans offers  Business Plan: Software, Samples, Online Tools & Consulting (http://www.fast4cast.com/index.aspx). The primary feature is that the online tool has an integrated example, word processor editor, and in-line charting tool for financial graphs.

MiniPlan.com is a join promotional venture between the Wall Street Journal and PaloAlto Softwares (see Create a Mini Business Plan with the MiniPlan at startup.wsj.com at http://wsj.miniplan.com/). One of the great features of the site are the calculator tools. For example there is an interactive calculator for examining “what if sceanieros” for break even analysis.

While not a complete business plan template, The Budket Financial Planning tool (see Budket at http://www.thebudket.com/main/more) focus specifically on budget templates (start-up, cash flow, etc.). A feature of this tool is that once a budget is completed, the author can invite others to review the budget and enter their comments on-line. This then is an on-line budget collaboration tool that could be used among partners and/or advisors.

Startup Business School has a step-wise interactive business planning tool (see Startup Business School: My Business - Section 4, Step 2 at http://www.startupbusinessschool.com/ ) that asks the user to answer a series of questions and and formats the answers into a complete document. The steps covered range from creating your company, rapid prototyping,operations & launch and marketing & sales. Each step has links to resources (short videos and articles) that are intended to help explain the specific sub-topic.

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Snack Food, Outsourced

Food Biz Startup extends congradulations to Portland’s own Brett Stern (Beer Chips) who was listed as on of “Americas Most Promising Startup’s” by Business week. Origionally Posted by Business Week

Beer Chips

Brett Stern

When Brett Stern sees a problem, he fixes it. A lifelong tinkerer, the 50-year-old inventor used his expertise in industrial design to market snack foods. Unable to find a beer-flavored potato chip, Stern whipped up his own batch. Within two years, he was shipping packages of aptly named Beer Chips, which retail from $1.39 to $3.60, to Whole Foods (WFMI), SuperValu (SVU), and Publix grocery stores. Stern used $11,200 of his own money to launch the Portland (Ore.) company. He says he generated $500,000 in revenue in 2007 and $1.3 million in 2008. He claims a profit margin of 11%, which he credits to his virtual business model: He outsources everything but the creativity. Controlling only the design and direction of the product, he relies on others to manufacture and distribute it. That keeps his overhead low: His only employees—a bookkeeper and a marketer—both work part time from a garage. Stern, who’s known to carry chip samples in his car and give them to strangers, also keeps his eye on the big picture. He hopes to create enough demand for Beer Chips, with such new flavors as margarita and Bloody Mary, that a snack-food company will purchase it.

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