The best entrepreneurial candidates for VAPG do their due diligence, looking at all aspects of the business, like financing, marketing, product testing, talking to others and hire a team (like lawyers, accountants, etc.) that can help them before rushing into the process.
Jonny Hunter of the Underground Food Collective talks about his company’s horizontally integrated business model and the efficiencies of sharing a common a common brand, administrative services and marketing across multiple related business entities through shared ownership, experienced management and shared consumer insights.
Financing food businesses is getting more complicated, with national brands/CPG producers having to raise millions to support their growth. However, large, established food companies are often slow to innovate and this provides an opportunity for those companies to make a strategic investment in up-and coming brands.
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Conscious 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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To 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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Leanne 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 it is her main business model.
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Stephen 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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Bill 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 up.