New England Specialty Foods
Non-Profit Marketing, Cost Reduction & Information Services for Small Producers
If you've been creating and selling your own specialty food products for any length of time, you've probably discovered just how difficult it is to make a profit, after paying all of your costs. Don't worry, it's not just you. Ask anyone you can find who's doing this, and if you find someone who says they're making a profit, question them further. In all likelihood, they are confusing revenues with profits.
Nearly a decade as a small creator and marketer of my own specialty food products, currently Angus Sauces, has taught me a lot about the realities of the business, especially how many hurdles there are to making a real profit. Conversations with numerous other small producers at demos, trade shows, tasting events, etc. has made the big picture extremely clear. Most notably, the odds of success are extremely slim. A major specialty foods buyer once told me that in ten years as a buyer, he'd only seen two small specialty food businesses make any money. Really!
Why is that? There are a number of reasons. Co-packers, Brokers, Distributors and Retailers all have mandatory cost requirements for doing business with them. Making specialty food products on a small scale, with high unit costs, results in product costs much higher than the retail prices of large, established competitor's products, which are produced in large quantities. So can anyone make a profit? The answer is simple. If you do what everyone else has been doing, the way they've been doing it, the chances of ever making a profit are highly unlikely, and that's the truth.
Why can this website help when the odds of ever making a profit are so slim? Because it's premise is based on one of the most frequent things I've heard mentioned by other small producers, that finding ways to work together would be the solution. Until now, this really hasn't happened, but strength in numbers is probably the only way most producers ever have, of making a profit, though. That's what this website is all about though, creating a 'Business Cluster', or in other words, a group with some of the best aspects of a co-op, without all the red tape.
How will this work? There are over a thousand small and medium specialty foods producers in the six New England states, spending many millions annually all totalled, yet until now, this buying power has gone to waste. The first major goal of New England Specialty Foods, is to leverage the combined buying power of all of the area's specialty foods producers, into one powerful entity, which will result in better prices on all products and services needed, for everyone in this 'business cluster'. Since there are several other substantial goals which we believe can be accomplished with this business cluster, this website could become too large to navigate easily, so we've created another, sister site to handle the Buying Group. This site is Specialty Foods Ingredients. The name, taken figuratively, includes much more than food ingredients, since everything needed is actually an 'ingredient' in the process of creating and selling specialty foods.
How does one participate in this Buying Group? Very soon, all businesses listed in the Directory on this site will be contacted as soon as possible. There is no charge to participate. It is absolutely, 100% FREE.
How is this possible? The vendors pay a fee to advertise their products and services, at discounted pricing, to over a thousand participants, which saves them a lot of time. Discounted pricing is reasonable, because that's how volume business works.
Questions and comments about this are welcome at info@newenglandspecialtyfoods.com .
New Affordable Ways for Specialty Foods Producers to Increase Profits
An Example of a Successful Co-op.
Here's a link to a very successful co-op to show just what's possible. You've probably seen their products in better stores in the area.
FOR PRODUCERS
