Coming up soon, in the April issue, I’ve got an article addressing your specific question as to where to go to get the necessary information for becoming a “wholesale” food manufacturer.
As for payback/ROI, let me share this trur story with you. A good friend of mind was making an excellent quality pizza, and he wanted to take it to the supermarkets, I helped him, and together we launched a new, frozen pizza into our local market (not a huge market, one serving about half a million people). We even had television plugs for the product, pretty neat. I was pulling product from our local Dillon’s supermarket for weekly testing and evaluation. About 4-months into the launch, his product strangly disappeared from the shelves. It seems that one of the BIG players didn’t like the “new kid” on the block, so they began a local store promotion to increase sales, went something like this: They told the managers of the frozen foods section all they had to do was to sell X-number of cases of their product within the next 3-months and their name would be put into the hat for a drawing for a trip to some exotic location, all expenses paid! Since the managers had control over the foods in the cases, you can guess that our pizza was not displayed right up front, in fact, it was not displayed at all! This act of “kindness” put my friend out of business in just over 6-months. Keep in mind that there is no way a new, up start company can compete with an existing company with an established cash flow, not to even mention a large wholesale manufacturer that is out there protecting their turf. Just be cautious.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
