Selling food from home: pros and cons.
Cooking and selling food from your home kitchen may come with a few downsides, but it makes sense when you’re starting your small business with limited funds.
Looking for a way to start your own food business with the lowest investment possible? Consider starting operations from your home kitchen to move to a bigger and more professional space at a later stage, if needed.
Why start from home?
Opening a restaurant from scratch costs an average of 450.000€ hence not viable option for everybody. Renting a commercial kitchen will save you some money but will usually limit the space and time you have available for kitchen production. While having a dedicated space to professionally cook and sell your food can boost your business and make you look more professional to your clients, it’s also the most complicated and expensive solution to start off with your food business idea.
“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart … pursue those.” — Michael Nolan
Converting your home kitchen to a professional kitchen instead, will allow you to pursue your dream without any risk and with the minimum startup capital. Working from home can help create a balance between career and family, give you flexibility and increase your potential income, but at the same time it’s equally imperative to discern the complete picture of what it would be like to kick start your food business from your kitchen as it’s not going to be an extension of your current kitchen life where you cook for family, friends and have fun.
Pros and Cons of an home-based food business
While starting from home might seem like the perfect idea, you should carefully weigh the pros and cons of cooking and selling food from home.
Con — Make a few changes in your kitchen: in order to run your business from home your kitchen must comply with your country laws and regulations. While you can still test your business idea from home with a few friends and neighbours, you’ll need to be ready to make a few changes to the layout of your kitchen when you’ll actually start doing business.
Pro — Save money and reduce start-up costs: you’ll save money in operating expenses like rent and utilities, you’ll avoid most of kitchen utensils costs since you can re-use your own, and you’ll save commuting costs. Depending on your location you may even be able to take tax deductions based on the percentage of your home that’s used for business purposes.
Pro — Test your products with less risk: thanks to the low entry barriers (no startup cost, fewer legal requirements), starting from home is the best solution to test your product in the market before you invest a lot of time and money in a bigger business.
Con — Separating the two worlds: is your home large enough to ensure you can separate the living world with the working environment? Your cooking, food preparation and sales activities will take a lot of space and time in your home kitchen. Are you and your family ready for this?
Pro — Work from Home: this is the best part of the business. Work from home will eliminate long commute, will give you more time to spent with your family while working in a less stressful environment. It will help you balance career, family, leisure and wellness.
Pro — Work when you want: being your own boss you can choose your schedule and workload. You could decide to start part-time, work only late at night or early in the morning, while kids are at school or go full-time with it.
Con — Filter distractions: cook and prepare food can be a challenge for you if your children are around, if your friends are hanging out at the park or simply if the only thing you would like to do today is eating instead of cooking. While the list of distractions goes on, you may find difficult to focus on your business.
Pro — Stimulate people around you: cooking and selling from home will ensure that your family and people around you will be exposed to the art of cooking, a precious skill which is in decline during the recent years, and an entrepreneurial environment that will stimulate creativity, innovation and collaboration at home.
Pro — Connect with the community: food has a universal appeal and language. This business will help you break barriers and meet new people around you that you otherwise wouldn’t have met. Good community relationships will nurture your business and ensure a good, trusted and valued name in the industry. Create strong relationships with people in your neighbourhood will help you and your family living a happier daily life.
Con — High production and marketing costs: since you do not have a physical shop in a popular street, you really have to work at getting your name out there with tasting session, advertisement campaigns and explore partners and collaborations in order to get clients. As start-up business you’ll have low volumes and this will result in higher cost of production (ingredients, packaging, labelling…)
Pro — Set aside from competition: being small and dynamic it’s very easy to set your offer apart from competitors and customise your services for customers in your area.
Pro — Create a unique customer experience: if working at home might not be considered professional for entrepreneur in other industries, in the food industry home-made sounds always better. By interacting with clients at a more personal level, welcoming them in your living space or going to meet them at their place, you’re creating a unique service that will enhance the customer experience, which is very difficult to achieve from other “standard businesses”.
In a world where most of our time is spent online and social media are driving most of our relationships, we believe that reaching out to people interested in your food business idea is easier than ever. While you can start your business from home with no start-up capital and get your business up and running with few thousand euros, nobody but YOU can decide if this is something you and your family want . You can only decide by yourself when is the right time to make the jump.
If the pros and cons of starting your food business from home are now clearer to you, We would love to have you comment or recommend this article.
