Sauces
I have seen idea twice in recent memory, most recently when my mother decided that she would try to sell her home made sauces in her village in Portugal. She approached a couple of restaurants and shops and worked out the cost of bottling before deciding that she had retired for a reason an did not need the headaches of running a business.
The other place I saw this was on TV on Growing up Gotti. Not a programme I normally watch but I remember Victoria Gotti taking her ¡§Sunday gravy¡¨ to her favourite Italian restaurant to try out on the customers. If you are interested you can find the recipe here www.recipezaar.com/173158.
Both Victoria and my mum worked out that the ideal place to sell their sauce would be in busy restaurants, where it might save the chef some time. In Portugal where my mother lives the country food is mostly plain and she thought that there would be a demand for her sauces, unfortunately people are not prepared to pay more for a sauce and restaurants were not willing to take on the additional cost.
There are however ways of making money from your sauce, or indeed from other
dishes. If you think this business is for you then we suggest the following:
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Networking
Website
Delicatessen
Direct Response
Networking is a great way to start any business off, it allows you to test the water, check how your product, and even the packaging will be accepted. Give a few bottles of sauce away and try to create some buzz amongst your peer group. Providing the product is affordable you should soon be getting phone calls for orders. I would recommend putting a website address and phone number on the labels so that would be customers can contact you.
You can definitely promote a product like this over the internet. Cooking forums and recipe sites are a good place to get noticed. Write some press releases with companies like www.prweb.com and work on optimising your website for the Search Engines so that anyone looking for your kind of sauce will get directed to your website. Once you build some kind of brand presence you could even try EBay and see whether you can sell any bottles directly, there is no cost unless you sell so you may as well try.
Most big cities globally have delicatessen or speciality food stores. These should be your first port of call, as they have a customer base that are (generally speaking) willing to try new foods and concepts, and more importantly this is an additional product to them, not something that will detract from profit as in the restaurant example above. Offer the sauces on a trial basis at first so that there is no cost to the store and let them see how well they work. If you want to keep them in-store you had better do some promotion work once they hit the shelves, or you will soon be handed back the unsold bottles.
My preference for this kind of product is Direct Response. If you can get people
to read about your sauce(s) and why it is better than other products then
you have a chance of bringing in orders. Decide what you want to emphasise,
is your product more organic, healthier, longer lasting, and better tasting?
Maybe it is all of these? Maybe you have a sauce that is completely original
that will complement both red and white meat as well as fish dishes? Hopefully
you get the idea by now, you can advertise in newspapers, magazines, using
flyers, on posters in your town, if you are feeling braver then invest in
some advertisements in cookery magazines or even on the Shopping channel.
Providing you can sell your customers on the benefits of your product to
them, they will buy it.
Given that you know how to make your sauce (or are about to go and experiment) I shouldn¡¦t need to tell you where to get your ingredients. Over time, as you start to build volume you may want to look at this and try to get discounts or buy from the wholesaler or producer as opposed to the store.
You will need to get labels printed and bottle or jar your sauces. You can buy a simple machine for home use. Have a look at www.vigneron-sp.com/ to see the table top type appliances that would be ideal for a home business. You can do your own labelling using a home computer with printer and some blank labels, or you can pay someone to help you with this such as www.autoidtech.com/eng/index.asp. Try www.specialitybottle.com for bottles.
You will notice after comparing prices that you will not be able to charge the same price as a bottle of Ketchup. The cost of bottles and labels adds up and there is the cost of your bottling machine to add in. Don¡¦t worry about this providing you can target your market to people who want to buy gourmet level foods. Remember your sauce is the best!
The suggestions above were found using Google as examples of what will be needed, you can search Google, or www.alibaba.com yourselves to find better deals if you are interested in this idea.
Despite the fact that you could start this business from your own kitchen, it is not a cheap business to start. Bottling and marketing will eat several thousand dollars as a minimum investment and this could run to tens of thousands if you decide to push seriously.
If you intend to use direct marketing you can teach yourself to write copy but you will need to study and measure results to work out what works and what doesn¡¦t. The alternative is to hire a copy-writer to do this for you, which even though expensive may be worthwhile.