Herbs & Spices
Cooking is big business; not just in terms of eating out at fancy restaurants but as a hobby. www.amazon.com lists 25,000 cookery books and Google has 8.5 million results for “cookery”. We all love to eat but many of us it seems like the preparation part as well.
Herbs and Spices do not need to be shipped in large containers, can be bought in bulk and re-packaged and lend themselves readily to onward shipping, They also have the benefit of being a readily acceptable gift if they are well packaged for example inside an attractive spice rack.
I would look to buy large quantities of herbs and spices and re-package them either into cellophane bags (which are very cheap) or attractive bottles and jars. You may also want to consider box sets, or spice racks as gifts.
Marketing could consist of the following: -
Networking
Ebay
Website
Green Grocers / Farm stores
Direct Mail
Finding buyers for your herbs may be easy initially as family and friends will definitely be interested. You should be able to deliver better quality products at close to supermarket prices, and people around us naturally want to support us if there is no cost to them in doing so.
Ebay has several thousand listings under “herbs”, but only 30 under “cooking herbs”. Equally there are only 4 results for Taragon (edit. Correctly spelt with two R’s there are 61 results). Other specific herbs such as Thyme and Sage have hundreds of listings but only a handful when combined with the word cooking. Thyme sells for $3.49 plus shipping for a jar “almost as big as a quart of milk” with a picture so you can see the size…. A little surreal.
A search for “buy herbs and spices” on Google returns 1.2million results. It will be hard to get your website noticed. If your mark-up permits then you can experiment with Google and Yahoo’s advertising online, or you can advertise your website offline to drive people to the website.
Whilst Green Grocers are rare these days they still exist and many people prefer the quality and service that comes from a specialist supplier over the pre-packaged supermarket experience. There are also farm shops that specialise in selling fresh farm produce. Many of these shops will also consider carrying an additional product line, especially one that takes up a small amount of space such as a stand with herbs and spices on it.
Direct mail can work for this kind of product if you can find customers who are likely to be interested. You may want to consider buying lists of cooking students, or paying a commission to schools, book stores etc. if they make the offer direct to their relevant customers.
The most obvious answer here would be to grow your own, but to ensure a scalable business and something that could be done in your spare time I won’t recommend you become a full time farmer (even of herbs and spices).
A search on Google for “herbs spices suppliers” brings up a plethora of results. Sorting through leads you to great little companies like www.jekkasherbfarm.com in England who will happily supply you with bulk orders that you can then break up.
Adding the word India to the above search can get you a more exotic mix and includes sites like http://greenearthproducts.tradeindia.com
Finally www.alibaba.com has 184 listings under a search for “herbs spices”.
You might consider selling organic herbs and spices for that extra touch of uniqueness.