Shaulablog

I had the privilege of working with Tera Johnson of the Food Finance Institute last week to put on part 1 of her Consultant Training and her Entrepreneur BootCamp here in Seattle.  Business Impact Northwest hosted the training.  Tera is great because of her wealth of experience in food, beverage and agriculture businesses.  After a week of trainings we drove up to the Skagit Co-op (I finally joined!) and met with folks from the local SBDC, the Puget Sound Food Hub, and Viva Farms.  Hopefully we’ll organize future trainings up there.  Tera’s specialty is value-added processing and selling products.

The first week of training focuses on the importance of being in touch with consumer markets – crafting products consumers want and can understand.  Then it moves into figuring out who’s your target market, where they are, and then matching your business model and your market size.   If you’re in a big area like the Puget Sound region, you can probably make a living for yourself and some income for others making your product in a shared kitchen and selling at farmers markets if you have a unique niche.  If you want to go into wholesale distribution, that’s frankly a different business with much lower margins and requires much higher volume – you need to gather your resources and shoot to get to the next level of stability ASAP. Trying to grow slowly and incrementally can accumulate operating losses that eventually drag you down.  The next sessions of class will be about how to finance these different kinds of business.

To better understand where the market opportunities are, Tera shared a wealth of resources for staying informed about market trends.  Most of these are free.

• Organic Trade Association (OTA) Industry Reports https://www.ota.com/resources/market-analysis
• International Dairy Deli and Bakery Association (IDDBA) “What’s in Store” and Industry Reports http://iddba.org/
• National Restaurant Association Industry Reports http://www.restaurant.org/Research
• Specialty Food Association Knowledge Center https://www.specialtyfood.com/knowledge-center/
• MINTEL (great stuff, not free!)

The best trade shows to attend to get a sense of your market:

• Natural Category – Natural Products Expo West http://www.expowest.com
• Gourmet/Specialty Category – Fancy Food New York https://www.specialtyfood.com/shows-events/summer-fancy-food-show/  The SF show is smaller, as west-coast companies this may make more sense.
• Mainstream Retail – IDDBA http://www.iddba.org One entrepreneur attending our workshop endorsed this show – she said there’s an ‘Expert’s Hall’ where attendees can make appointments to get free consulting from different experts in every aspect of food business.
• Food Service – National Restaurant Association, Chicago- https://www.nationalrestaurantshow.com/

Attendees also shared their favorite local resources for businesses.  Local CDFIs Ventures https://www.venturesnonprofit.org/ and Business Impact Northwest https://businessimpactnw.org/ offer lots of workshops, as well as the local SBA.  The University of Washington has many programs where student groups will do projects for businesses, market research and target marketing was one such project through the BIG program.

https://foster.uw.edu/centers/consulting-and-business-development-center/undergraduate-student-programs/

Other Northwest local conferences mentioned included Provender.  Seattle Good Business Network in Seattle has been organizing some food-business related events, and Davis Wright Tremaine in Portland has started an annual invitation-only Farm-To-Label one-day conference.