My Experience in Opening Small Food Business

Last year (2018) in the gap period of graduation, I was trying to open a small business with a friend. My background is Visual Communication Design, and my friend is Business Management. At that time, we just dreamed of having a success business. But then the reality is not always as smooth as we imagined.

We prepared well about anything. It goes on how we should take care bank account, how we should split the profit, how we should manage online presence, etc. We want to have best outcomes for this product.

2 months strategy preparation

Because our team only has 2 members. So we were doing what we can do. Meanwhile my friend handling the production, I took the role of helping in marketing and selling. So at the beginning of ideation process, my friend has idea to reduce our amount of work by making some cooperation with another company to produce our product, and we only add some additional value to it before we redistributed it.

At the first week of preparation, we try to encourage ourselves to start buying different kind of raw jerky (yes, we try to sell ready-to-eat jerky). After find the right one, we decide to visit the producer and proposing that we are trying to open new business and wants to have some cooperation with contract.

Develops the Packaging

My creative energy was limited, there is no way of doing business concept and focus on product look in the same time. If we should, one of them should be sacrificed, or no one of it will won.

The developing process of packaging is also a bit tricky, because our resources were limited, and if we need to pre order beautiful and industrial standard of packaging, (at that time) the off-set company would ask the minimum amount of order which it was asking us at least ordering 200.000 amount of packaging. and it was impossible for us as a small business to fulfilled it.

I was the one whose responsible on product look. What I discussed to my partner was, how about we bought a ready-to-use packaging and sticks sticker on its appearance. My partner accept the idea, so the executions was started.

A good image of product can effect the whole look in branding

For attracting targeted consumers, we can’t use cartoon look on design, so it should use real photo instead. Because we had limited resources (time, money) to rent studio, buy the ingredients, etc. to make beautiful images. We decided to buy stock photo from internet.

Since I have no power and significant knowledge to do some product photo-shoot, it was so helpful to reduce amount of my workload by bought ready-to-use resources to be used. Thanks to the good stock photo, it was worked so well on all of our branding media.

The Marathon

We had done many trial error to make a high-end products, and it's need kind of 3–4 weeks to meet the right standards. We worked the development process while we were in the middle of our own busy life, so we couldn't done the process quickly. While we were trying to walk the pave, we were also starting to discuss about buying machine. At that time, we already visit several candidates stores and also visited some food machines expo to look for inspiration.

After all of design (logo, packaging, and visual campaign) ready, we started to executes the next step, selling. Because I was the one whose responsible in selling, I started to do canvasing. In the same time, I also tried to made and executed idea for digital campaign.

It could only survived for 61 days

What we beliefs at that time is we need to be strong in offline market before online market. So, it would have good images in offline either in online.

Short story, all preparation has been finished, some of products has started to found its market. My friend produced the jerky, and I prepare the needs of packaging and branding (retail packaging, stickers, socmed, etc.), and collect-distribution the products and money.

While doing canvasing, gradually I realised that some stores employee or employer have variation in responses us. Some are welcoming, some are giving suspicion to our product, and some are declining in gesture boldly. Yeah, at least 5 stores I visited starting to trust us to have our product to be exhibited in their stores.

It was the first 3 days, I always following up each stores that I listed in manually on dedicated notes. Our expectations wasn’t really good. But at least, 32/80 are starting to be sold, it made us happy.

For securing raw jerky stock to be produced, we were contracting the supplier for sending raw jerky to us 1 kg/ months. We hope that it would be sold quickly. But, weeks by weeks, the selling performance was not meet our expectations. At that time, we discussed that we should back to our own nature, and will do business again in another time when we are ready.

Believe it or not, when we have gave it all of our worries, we started to receive info that in some stores our products was sold out, and asked us to restocked. Especially in apartments area with a lot of people commuting and need quick service. We restocked that store 3 times, 5–10 pcs each in a week. But our decision has reach absolution. We did not ready yet. So with sad feelings, we should postpone, dividing our assets according to our investment percentages and dismissed the business.

What we have learnt

• In every business and teamwork, we always need moral support
• We need more human resources to spread the impact
• It is impossible to handle campaign alone
• It is impossible to handle campaign and selling in the same time, alone.
• There is no instant in business
• Documentations is very important
• You need money to make money
• The product need to being placed online in the first time too