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.
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MobCraft beer is a brewery and taproom with a unique business model of crowdsourcing ideas for beer recipes from their customers. Knowing how much equity they needed vs. debt to finance their facility build out and equipment needs helped them pitch specific asks to both banks and investors, including for their $2 million tap room and production facility.
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Jonny Hunter of the Underground Food Collective talks about his wish that values around local and sustainable food could be used to create systems that have scalable efficiencies that are affordable to consumers. He advocates for working together to build and sustain the infrastructure that would support processing and other means to scale up the local food system.
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Because Quince and Apple has labor-intensive, artisanal products, the best strategy was not to compete on quantity or price. Instead, they chose to compete by dominating an emerging niche (pairing their products with specialty cheeses) while telling the defensibly unique story of their artisanal processes.
Food entrepreneurs themselves often feel changed when taking outside investor capital. They feel the weight of the responsibility of paying back those investors with a return. They often work even harder than they were before because others are sharing the risk with them and are emotionally invested in their business as well.
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Within six months of launching their company they got their product out in front of consumers, trying out 127 product variations over an additional 18 months in just two stores. Once they honed in on their product, they rapidly expanded into distribution and raised multiple rounds of funding to support their growth.
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USDA 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.
With consumers, entrepreneurs should develop in-depth personas about their target customer and use the language that speaks directly to their unmet need. When speaking to funders, entrepreneurs need to tell the story of their business model, their revenue model and their brand positioning i.e. the story they reinforce with consumers.
The single most important thing to do when starting a farm is to create a month-by-month cash flow projection. In the short term, cash flow is much more critical than profitability, because if cash flow is negative, the farm cannot survive once cash runs out. Profitability comes into play when the farmer is ready to retire or pass it on to the next generation.
Small diversified farms are ideally suited to agri-entertainment. The chief qualification for the rural landowner who expects to make a living from the land through agri-tourism is the desire and the ability to cater to tourists and meet their expectations of a farm visit.