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The Edible-Alpha Podcast
The Edible-Alpha® podcast is your source for actionable insights into making money in food. Hosted by the Food Finance Institute, we talk to a wide range of stakeholders about what it really takes to grow a successful food or farm business.
Listen to the Edible-Alpha Podcast
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Building Great Financial Systems For Your Food Business
Listen to the full episode: Building Great Financial Systems For Your Food BusinessFrom the entrepreneur’s perspective, the most important thing when using an accounting package is to ensure accurate setup and data entry so that they are able to produce accurate financial statements. While entrepreneurs need to understand their financial statements and financial drivers, they can often outsource some accounting work.
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Food Business Brands Evolve With The Consumer
Listen to the full episode: Food Business Brands Evolve With The ConsumerOriginally branded as Ethnic Spicery, Flavor Temptations changed their brand to fully communicate the joyful, family-building experience of making memories through Indian cooking so that their brand resonated more deeply with their target consumer. They also changed their packaging to better share their values and to stand out on grocery store shelves.
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The Capital Conundrum of Rural Economic Development
Listen to the full episode: The Capital Conundrum of Rural Economic DevelopmentUSDA programs serve not just agricultural producers but also rural businesses and rural people more broadly, including programs meant to incentivize and leverage private dollars for investment in rural areas. However, there is a big need to educate investors and entrepreneurs about realistic opportunities for investment and business development in rural America.
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Midwestern BioAg and the Business of Biological Farming
Listen to the full episode: Midwestern BioAg and the Business of Biological FarmingMidwestern BioAg is a company that provides farmers with consulting and products (mostly inputs) that help improve yields, resiliency and profitability by using biological farming methods i.e. treating the farm like an ecosystem and preserving the long-term health of the soil.
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New Product Development and Rollouts For National Food and Beverage Brands: A Process
Listen to the full episode: New Product Development and Rollouts For National Food and Beverage Brands: A ProcessBig food and beverage companies start the new product development process by focusing on their target consumer and the value proposition they are offering that consumer through their brand promise. Discovering and defining a consumer driven product is much harder to do than making a food product.
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Shared-Use Kitchens And Their Tenants: A Shared Path to Financial Sustainability
Listen to the full episode: Shared-Use Kitchens And Their Tenants: A Shared Path to Financial SustainabilityFEED Kitchens is a shared-use kitchen that also serves as a business incubator for food businesses. Currently, about 80% of their revenue is from fee-for-service kitchen use. They would needabout 45%-50% use (24 hours a day, 365 days a year), up from their current 35% and with a few more anchor tenants to completely cover…
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Considering Manufacturing In-House? Waste Can Be A Resource That Improves Your Food Business’ Bottom Line
Listen to the full episode: Considering Manufacturing In-House? Waste Can Be A Resource That Improves Your Food Business’ Bottom LineZero Waste Facility Certification can improvea food business’ bottom line while helping them meet existing standards for building design, construction and operations. LEED and Zero Waste Facility Certification also give them a framework to exceed standards where it makes business sense.
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How Much Is My Company Worth? Company Valuations With LBW Wealth Management
Listen to the full episode: How Much Is My Company Worth? Company Valuations With LBW Wealth ManagementCompany valuations should be done based on a rational justification of the future growth rate and future earnings of the company, as well as the fundamentals of the business model. For example, whether the company is defensibly unique and how long its competitive advantage can be sustained are both key drivers of company value.
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SBA 504 Loans with Diane Byler of WBD
Listen to the full episode: SBA 504 Loans with Diane Byler of WBDAn SBA 504 loan is a special product that can only be offered by a Certified Development Company (CDC) like WBD in partnership with a local lender. The 504 loan is designed to help small businesses grow and create jobs by financing fixed assets like real estate and equipment through low, fixed rates and lower…
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Food Hubs with Tara Roberts-Turner of the Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative
Listen to the full episode: Food Hubs with Tara Roberts-Turner of the Wisconsin Food Hub CooperativeDue to its business model, Wisconsin Food Hub Co-op needed to reach at least $3.3 million in sales to break even. To maintain their margins, they built capacity through adequate staffing and have cheap warehouse space close to their farmers which serves only cooling and aggregation/distribution functions, rather than other forms of value-added processing.
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Farm Credit and Value-Added Agriculture
Listen to the full episode: Farm Credit and Value-Added AgricultureThe farm credit system includes many lending organizations around the country and is a great source of financing, including for non-traditional farmers like CSAs and value-added on-farm processors. These institutions also sometimes provide educational opportunities around financial literacy, financial statements and what it takes to successfully repay a loan
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Black Earth Meats Evolves Into Conscious Carnivore
Listen to the full episode: Black Earth Meats Evolves Into Conscious CarnivoreConscious Carnivore, a whole animal retail butcher shop in Madison, WI evolved from Black Earth Meats (Black Earth, Wisconsin), a larger scale meat production facility and wholesale brand due to business challenges and some of the advantages of retail.
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Biological Farming and Human Scale Meat
Listen to the full episode: Biological Farming and Human Scale MeatTo satisfy demand for local/organic meats, Barlett Durand needed consistent throughput and quality. Rather than scaling up to compete with large-scale industrialized meat processors or launching a direct to consumer farm, he began aggregating meat from existing local farms under the brand Black Earth Meats.
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A Food Business Model Journey with Leanne Cordisco
Listen to the full episode: A Food Business Model Journey with Leanne CordiscoLeanne Cordisco started out making a toffee for wholesale via a local distributor. However, she realized that she did not want to raise the capital to cover at least $1 million of upfront costs to support a national brand. She opened Chocolaterian as another revenue stream and more immediate source of cash flow, and now…
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Working With Credit Unions Like Summit Credit Union To Grow Your Food Business
Listen to the full episode: Working With Credit Unions Like Summit Credit Union To Grow Your Food BusinessThis podcast outlines what it is like to work with credit unions. Summit helps food entrepreneurs access SBA 7a programs to provide up to $5 million of capital to younger businesses for working capital, inventory, and equipment purchases. The SBA 7a Express program provides a quicker turnaround than the traditional 7a, allowing for loans up…
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Working With Alternative Lenders like WWBIC To Grow Your Food Business
Listen to the full episode: Working With Alternative Lenders like WWBIC To Grow Your Food BusinessThis podcast outlines what it is like to work with alternative lenders and CDFIs like WWBIC. WWBIC offers a combination of relevant business classes, business loans up to $250,000, assistance with personal financial management, and connections to people who can make things happen for business owners and entrepreneurs across the state of Wisconsin.
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Getting All The Way to a Strategic Investment In Your Food Company
Listen to the full episode: Getting All The Way to a Strategic Investment In Your Food CompanyStephen and Chris McDiarmid of Gorilly Goods, a certified organic raw healthy snack maker in Jackson, Wisconsin talk about how their dehydration process and unique flavor profiles make them defensibly unique from other snack brands and how focusing on pitching their business model led to strategic investment in their company.
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What’s In a Name? Trademark Protection for Your Food or Beverage Brand
Listen to the full episode: What’s In a Name? Trademark Protection for Your Food or Beverage BrandSince selling food or beverages like beer are about selling your brand, protecting that brand and its growth in value through the trademark process is very important. Trademarks should be distinct and evocative as opposed to generic and descriptive, mimizing the likelihood of confusion with other trademarked intellectual property.
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Running the Gauntlet: Leveraging Legal Rights and Regs in Craft Beer Startups
Listen to the full episode: Running the Gauntlet: Leveraging Legal Rights and Regs in Craft Beer StartupsDistribution rights matter a great deal for breweries and distilleries. Talking with a lawyer who has training and experience in the matter is the best way to protect the financial future of your beer brand. Whether or not you are a brewery vs. a brewpub matters a great deal to regulators.
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Formation Documents, Raising Equity, and Protecting Recipes
Listen to the full episode: Formation Documents, Raising Equity, and Protecting RecipesThe type of entity you form and the type of legal protections you undertake matters in terms of your strategic path to grow and what kinds of money you are able to raise to support that growth. When raising equity, find legal counsel that understands what you need to do to comply with securities law…
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Growing An Artisan Cheese Company By Selling Direct to Consumers
Listen to the full episode: Growing An Artisan Cheese Company By Selling Direct to ConsumersBill Anderson of Creme de la Coulee is a Wisconsin local artisan cheese maker who uses a CSA model through a cheese of the month club to connect directly with consumers. He talks about what it takes to grow a local artisan cheese company and what you have to consider when thinking about scaling that…
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Building Yumbutter Into a National Nut and Seed Butter Brand
Listen to the full episode: Building Yumbutter Into a National Nut and Seed Butter BrandMatt D’Amour of Yumbutter talks about the challenges in growing a national food brand and it is important to raise the right amount of money (usually more than you think) to support the roll-out of your national brand in grocery stores. It is important for your brand to have multiple pillars to remain defensibly unique.