Startups

SAGE contributes to the food system by helping elevate the data around the impact of food and agriculture in a way that helps people understand the connections between this sector and the rest of society and the economy.

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #60, Tera catches up with consultant Alli Ball, creator of the Retail Ready online course and the Food Biz Wiz podcast....

In Edible-Alpha® podcast #65, Tera interviews Heidi Huntington, vice president of finance at AVL Growth Partners in Boulder, Colorado, which lends finance and operations...

Brad Rostowfske, of Raise the BAR Innovation and FaB Wisconsin, sits in with Tera for an in-depth discussion on the food and beverage supply chain before COVID-19, currently and going forward. They discuss the many preexisting pain points and inefficiencies that the pandemic has now exacerbated and map out a more dynamic, interconnected, transparent system for the future.

Plenty of people would love to break into farming, but beginners’ number-one barrier is access to land. With so much farmland already claimed—by older farmers but also increasingly by investors, corporations, and developers—desirable acreage is hard to come by. Plus, the price of farmland in the U.S. is sky-high.

The FFI Fellows Program is back in 2023! Learn how this impactful, expert-led, FREE program helps food-focused businesses build financial resiliency and maximize profitability. Call for applications coming soon, so get the full scoop now.

This 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.

The focus of the narrative request for funding is to substantiatehow much of what kind of money the company needs and for what purpose. This should be done after other documentation and should be relatively brief to make it easy for lenders/investors to read. It should supplement other materials present in the financial package, like the pitch deck.

What category means in the context of a grocery store is difficult to define. Categories could be defined as groups of products that meet a similar consumer need or that can substitute for each other. This allows something like snacks, as a category, to cover many different types of products and have a plethora of sub-categories (salty snacks, sweet snacks, etc.).

Figuring out the best way to finance food businesses by optimizing their capital structure to reach minimum efficient scale is an undervalued creative exercise. But the myriad of challenges that confront entrepreneurs, from finding the right suppliers, co-packers, distributors, brokers or even the right target customer also demand creativity.