For those ready to follow their foodie dreams (or at least start thinking about it), this book provides the tools to decide if creating a specialty food business is right for you. Whether the goal is selling a single product online or developing a range of gourmet foods for grocery chains, this handbook helps hopeful food entrepreneurs become experts in everything from concept and production to sales and marketing. The author uses real-life examples from more than 75 successful individuals and businesses to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of starting a food enterprise, providing links to useful charts and worksheets to simplify the process and keep entrepreneurs organized and focused.
Business wisdom from more than seventy-five food industry experts, specialty food buyers, and entrepreneurs to help you start and run a small culinary concern. For those ready to follow their foodie dreams (or at least start thinking about it) Good Food, Great Business is the place to get organized and decide whether creating a specialty food business is really possible. Whether the goal is selling a single product online or developing a line of gourmet foods to be sold in grocery chains, this working handbook helps readers become food entrepreneurs—from concept to production to sales to marketing. Using real life examples from more than seventy-five individuals and businesses that have already joined the ranks of successful enterprises, the book walks readers through the good, the bad, and the ugly of starting a food business. In these pages, you’ll learn . . . Personal habits and business fundamentals that will help you in every walk of life How to choose the business idea or ideas that best fit you and your personality How to determine the viability of those ideas Concrete steps you need to take to make your business a reality
Stories and advice for creating a business out of the food you love. Do you have a passion for delicious food and want to create your own business out of it, but have no idea where to start? Cooking Up a Business is essential reading for aspiring entrepreneurs and gives you a real-world, up-close-and-personal preview of the exciting journey. Through profiles and interviews with nationally known food entrepreneurs from Popchips, Vosges Haut-Chocolat, Hint Water, Mary’s Gone Crackers, Love Grown Foods, Kopali Organics, Tasty, Evol, Justin’s Nut Butters, Cameron Hughes Wine, and more, you will gain applicable, practical guidance that teaches you how to succeed today: • How to create a national brand—with no connections or experience • The secret to getting meetings with grocery store buyers • The number one thing you need to know about food safety regulations • Why a grassroots budget might actually help you succeed • Specific advice for gluten-free, organic, wine, and beverage companies • What every entrepreneur wishes someone had told them at the beginning • Why doing what you love is always a good idea
Bring Your Fresh Ideas to Market and Profit Fueled by growing consumer demand for new tastes, cleaner ingredients, health benefits, and more convenient ways to shop and eat, the business of specialty food is taking off at full speed. This step-by-step guide arms entrepreneurial foodies like yourself with an industry overview of market trends, useful research for your marketing plan, and insight from practicing specialty food business owners. Determine your key growth drivers, opportunities, and how you can differentiate from other food businesses. Discover how to: Find the right avenue for your specialty food business: home-based, retail shop, production, wholesale, or distribution Create a solid business plan, get funded, and get the essential equipment Get the right licenses, codes, permits, insurance for your operations Gain a competitive edge using market and product research Find a profitable location, partnerships, and in-store shelf space Promote your business, products, and services online and offline Attract new and loyal customers using social media platforms to build your community of foodie fans. Manage daily operations, costs, and employees Plus, get valuable resource lists, sample business plans, checklists, and worksheets
A smart, inspiring cookbook showing how to plan, shop, and cook for dinners (and lunches and desserts) all through the week. The secret? Cooking ahead. Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, founders of the online kitchen and home destination Food52, pull off home-cooked dinners with their families with stunning regularity. But they don't cook every night. Starting with flexible base dishes made on the weekend, Amanda and Merrill mix, match, and riff to create new dinners, lunches, and even desserts throughout the week. Blistered tomatoes are first served as a side, then become sauce for spaghetti with corn. Tuna, poached in olive oil on a Sunday, gets paired with braised peppers and romesco for a fiery dinner, with spicy mayo for a hearty sandwich, and with zucchini and couscous for a pack-and-go salad. Amanda and Merrill’s seasonal plans give you everything you need to set yourself up well for the week, with grocery lists and cooking timelines. They also share clever tips and tricks for more confident cooking, showing how elements can work across menus and seasons to fit your mood or market, and how to be scrappy with whatever’s left in the fridge. These building blocks form A New Way to Dinner, the key to smarter, happier cooking that leaves you with endless possibilities for the week ahead.
From an accomplished journalist, this illuminating chronicle of the trials, tribulations, and triumph of Zingerman’s—a beloved, $70 million-dollar Michigan-based gourmet food store with global reach—is “thoughtful reading for foodies and entrepreneurs” (Kirkus Reviews). Certain businesses are legendary, exerting immense influence in their field. Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is one of those places. Over the years the flagship deli has expanded into a community of more than a dozen businesses, including a wildly successful mail order operation, restaurants, bakery, coffee roastery, creamery, candy maker, and events space—transforming Ann Arbor into a destination for food lovers. Founded in 1982 by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s philosophy of good food, excellent service, and sound finances has turned it into a company whose reach spans all corners of the gourmet food world.? Famous for its generous deli sandwiches, fresh bread, and flavorful coffee—all locally produced—Zingerman’s is also widely celebrated for its superb customer service and employee equity. The culture is one of respect and innovation, while maintaining very high standards. Every employee has access to the financial records, everyone has a voice, and everyone is heard. It has legions of enthusiastic customers, fans across the food world, and business principles and a work ethic that have been admired, analyzed, and copied. All that is revealed here, in Micheline Maynard’s Satisfaction Guaranteed. Discover how by 2019, Zingerman’s employed hundreds of employees and achieved close to $70 million in annual sales. When the pandemic struck, Zingerman’s growth momentarily screeched to a halt—but it survived by reinventing itself, while still serving its beloved food and selling its wide array of groceries. Now, as Zingerman’s looks forward to a half century in business, it is on track for stronger results than ever. A recipe for success in business and in life, Satisfaction Guaranteed provides a roadmap for manifesting joy and purpose in everything you do.
Julee Rosso, the co-author ofThe Silver Palate Cookbookbrings usthecookbook for the '90s, focusing on today's number-one food-health concern: reducing fat. Rosso offers a broad collection of more than 800 delicious and easy, new recipes and a treasure trove of nutritional information, gardening and shopping tips, seasonal and international menus, and food history and lore.Illustrations.
The definitive guide to buying, storing, and enjoying whole foods, in full color for the first time and revised and updated throughout. An inspiring and indispensable one-stop resource, The Essential Good Food Guide is your key to understanding how to buy, store, and enjoy whole foods. Margaret M. Wittenberg shares her insider’s knowledge of products available at national retailers and natural foods markets, providing at-a-glance buying guides. Her ingredient profiles include detailed preparation advice, such as dried bean cooking times, cooking ratios of whole grains to water, culinary oil smoke points, and much more. She also clarifies confusing food labels, misleading marketing claims, and common misperceptions about everyday items, allowing you to maximize the benefits of whole foods cooking. With full-color photography, this new edition of The Essential Good Food Guide is fully revised with the most up-to-date advice on organics, heirloom grains and legumes, gluten-free cooking options, and the new varieties of fruits and vegetables popping up at farmers’ markets across the country to help you make the most of your time in the grocery aisle and the kitchen.
The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
