Miranda Ballard runs Muddy Boots Foods Limited with her husband Roland. She gives us her second instalment on her experiences of setting up - great advice for anyone wanting to start their own food business.
After getting all the food regulations and Trading Standards requirements in place (see Part One), we suddenly realised that we didn’t have someone holding our hand anymore… now we had to sell our product ourselves.
The single most important bit of advice I can give anyone is simply to ask people for their advice. People and companies that have been up and running for longer than you, who have learned from mistakes and have incredibly helpful tips to share with you. Anything from where to get packaging printed and which food shows are worth the money and which aren’t, to local press contacts for marketing or suppliers of ingredients you’re using.
I think we’ve discovered that there is unfortunately no way to avoid making expensive mistakes entirely but if you can ask people for their advice, you’ll definitely find that you’re able to avoid some. Some which might have been just round the corner or some that were potential timebombs for your second or third year.
We called up companies in the area, went along to farmers’ markets and local fayres and got chatting to stallholders. We went to visit farmers and we picked the brains of businessmen and women all over the country; some who had been trading for only a bit longer than us and some legends in the industry like Judy Goodman of Goodman’s Geese.
The amazing thing you’ll find is that people really do give you a lot of time to help you. They know that advice was one of the most important things that they gathered when they started and they know that they still rely on it so much still. Humans are inherently kind, we reckon. They really do want to help others succeed in this world, and particularly when you’ll be strengthening their industry too, they’ll benefit from helping you.
You have to be quite gutsy to call up people or send them an email and don’t be offended if they don’t reply or say that they don’t have time. It’s nothing personal, it’s true that they don’t have time.
Something that we would definitely recommend doing is joining your regional food organisations. We’re in Worcestershire so we joined Heart of England Fine Foods. I cannot recommend them enough, if you’re in the area. They are an endless resource for information, Mintel reports (for market research) and – most importantly – a network of food producers like yourself. They work with producers and retails all around the Midlands and will know just the person to contact to help you with something, whatever it is you need to know. They also hold food events and conferences and set up introductions between producers and retailers (farmshops or restaurants etc).
We also joined Slow Food Worcestershire. Once again, this is a fantastic network of regional producers with an incredible passion for quality food. Anyone can apply to be member of this (producers and consumers) so you’ll benefit as much from talking to other producers as you will meeting wonderfully helpful ‘foodies’, ready to give you such helpful feedback and advice about what they look for in food that they buy.
We were also incredibly lucky to win a bursary through Slow Food for a stall at the BBC Good Food Show at the NEC in November last year. This was worth nearly £1000 – money we simply wouldn’t have been able to raise – and gave us our first taste of a big, national show.
After gathering all this amazing advice and support, we knew we were only going to be as good as the number of people to whom we could actually sell our product, and we simply had to get out there and sell.
We really can’t recommend farmers’ markets enough. Granted, the bubble has ‘burst’ a bit due to the 73% increase in farmshops and delis and supermarkets ‘buying local’ but as a market research tool, you can’t get better. You’re selling to a really helpful demographic and they will be incredibly generous with feedback… sometimes brutally so but it’s the best thing you can hear to help you improve.
We joined the London farmers’ markets first (www.lfm.org.uk). It’s a bit of a commute from Shrawley (4.15am start on a Saturday to drive back on Saturday afternoon and then 5.15am start on Sundays and back again Sunday afternoon) but it was really worth it to have a weekly market and to be at markets with a high footfall. We did Pimlico and Notting Hill on a Saturday and Marylebone and Islington on a Sunday. Even though it was a 2hr drive each time, the markets were only 15mins from each other so taking one each, it was only the equivalent to a one hour drive per person (if you see what I mean). I think it’s worth remembering that – keeping your travel costs down by not heading off in different directions and it definitely pays to take a separate market each, if there’s more than one of you, because if you’re making the produce for one, you might as well make it for two markets and have two stalls.
If you don’t take a lot of money, don’t worry. A lovely friend – Sarah-Jane from Ludlow Jam Pan – gave me an excellent tip to keep in mind, “The fee for the stall is still cheaper than an advert in the local paper” and you’ll realise what a great PR opportunity it is for your company. Just raising that profile and giving out tasters, telling people you sell online (if you do) or where else you’re stocked. You’ll find it really is worth it.
We joined Hereford, Worcester and Ludlow Farmers’ Markets as well as London. All are brilliant and so well organised. What they really have in common is that they’re all created out of a genuine passion for quality food and it’s another arena to meet with other producers and learn from them.
Personally, I wish that the marketing for farmers’ markets wasn’t as much ‘support your local farmer’ (which I think makes farmers sound like a charity and burdens the shoppers with a responsibility) but ‘buy this food… it is simply a lot tastier than mass-produced, compromised rubbish that you can find in budget food lines in supermarkets’. I wish that it challenged the public more to find out about quality food and ethical farming themselves, though it’s up the producers to brand and market their product well too. Tasters are by the far the most effective form of selling we know. Someone told us, when we started the markets, “taster taster taster until it kills you. You’ll work out how much you’ve given away in tasters and it’ll seem ridiculous but you have to do it until you’re well known.” We will still give away up to four burgers an hour on stalls, sometimes it’ll be 10% of the stock we take and not far off the profit we could have made that day but it’s the only way to prove to people that your product is really good and get them to buy into your brand.
You’ll start to find that they’ll buy from you regularly and repeat custom is the best feeling in the whole wide world.
Next up is branding and design. We got this wrong in the first year and are now having to raise the funds to start again – ouch! – but we’ve discovered this is actually very common. We’re still learning so much and can totally believe that we’ll always be learning. We love learning… starting to wish that the valuable lessons didn’t carry such a actual value (in £s) but it’s out of our control. You just have to suck it up, learn the lesson and improve.
I would definitely advise everyone to use a designer or design agency. I know that it’s expensive but I have never seen a home-designed logo or any homemade packaging that doesn’t instantly scream that it’s homemade.
If you want to have the ‘home-printed’ appearance, that’s absolutely fine. Though to go any further, I truly cannot see that you can do that without professionally designed or printed packaging. Also, you need your nutritional contents and trading standards regulations ticked off if you want to start supplying retailers (see part one).
When you meet a design agency, tell them that you’re on a budget. Set limits yourselves and ask them to be totally upfront about how much it’s going to cost.
We spent £700 on design and production for stickers to go on our brown paper carrier bags. We got all excited by the idea when we were with our designer but we so wish that we’d actually thought about it properly and realised it was a total waste of money. We wish that our designer had have questioned it but that’s not their job to do that.
I would definitely recommend going to an agency or designer with experience in food packaging as they will know the competition, what the retailers will want as standard, colours that will work in shop lighting, how important the front panel is (as most places side stack, rather than front to back stacking with the front facing out) and so on.
Take your prototypes to stores. They won’t mind if you just ask nicely, “may I put this on your shelf, to see how it stands out?” or “would you mind if I asked your shelf-stackers how easy this would be to display – will it fall over?, does it need to be in a shelf box?”. We didn’t do this and we really wish we had. When the tv crew put our packaging on a shop shelf for the market research scene we shot for the television episode, Roland and I walked passed it ourselves – cringe! We were so embarassed that we did that but the colours just weren’t strong enough, they were even weaker under the flurescent lighting in the supermarket. We also instantly saw that you couldn’t stack it on the shelves; it just fell backwards. As soon as you took the one in front, they sort of flumped to the side and all got mixed up with each other.
And then the eternal problem of ‘economies of scale’. This is all very well – “buy more and it’ll cost you less per unit” but completely useless when you don’t have the capital up front or the space to store pallet loads of packaging. It’s just a scale you have to work out yourself inline with what you can afford but I’d definitely recommend a small order to begin with, even though they’ll tell you it’s ‘crazy’ because it’s at the highest price but, if it turns out it needs an improvement, that’s a saving you’ll be thankful to have made.
Coming next…
Part Three: Accounting, Staff, Marketing, Food Shows,
Part Four: Selling Food Online, Trade Shows and Wholesale
You can find out more about Muddy Boots Foods Limited at www.muddybootsfoods.co.uk.
