Food Business From Home Ideas

Have you made a great start turning your innovative ideas for a food business into a reality and discovered that some of your small food business ideas need a little fine tuning?

Don't panic. Your unique food business ideas probably just need to be adjusted to take full advantage of your food business opportunities.

Don't get all your food business ideas from home

Here is a great way to get unstuck from problems in running your own home food business:

Spend some time interacting with the experts.

Go to baking classes. Participate in bake-offs, fairs, and monthly meetings of at home-entrepreneurs.

These kinds of meetings are a great way to get new online food business ideas and to get a new understanding of how to make your best homemade food ideas even better.

When you go to live events, don't be shy about introducing yourself. The people you meet may not turn out to be your best friends forever, but they may turn out to be valuable connections who help you make needed adjustments in your recipes, your cooking techniques, labeling, and marketing,

Reach out online to find new food business opportunities

If there are people in the homemade food business who make a product you admire, it's OK to reach out to them online to ask :How do you do that?"

This kind of communication isn't "TELL ME ALL YOUR HOMEMADE FOOD SECRETS!"

Just send a private message, after you have tried some of their homemade food, that you loved it, and then ask an intelligent question, not something you can Google or find on YouTube. As you grow your homemade food business, some of your closest friends will be people you reached out to with a sincere compliment.

Don't be standard when you can be generous

You get new ideas by sharing some of your old ideas. And you get new customers by giving the public more than they expect.

You make great homemade food, so give your customers more of it.

For example, there is a standard in the commercial baking industry that a "bite" is 1 inch by 1 inch. You don't want to make your "bites" too big to swallow in one bite, but what's wrong with making your serving size 1-1/4 inch by 1-1/4 inch?

There is another industry standard that a serving of pretzels is 10 pretzel bites or 50 pretzel sticks. You could package 12 pretzel bites or 55 pretzel sticks.

Don't give your customers the impression that you make bargain food or that you are giving food away. Just be sure they get enough of your homemade food to remember how good it is and come back for more.

More food is never a problem, for homemade food sellers, at least. Not enough food is what drives customers away,

Don't be afraid to be different

One of the things you will discover very quickly about homemade food sales and also about online homemade food sales is that a lot of people are trying it. You have serious competition, so don't be hesitant to stand out from the crowd.

Generosity, as we just discussed, is a difference customers will remember. But so are flavors and textures and food combinations that are uniquely your own.

Sometimes it is your products that will set you apart. Make the jams and jellies that your customers may have heard about from older family members, like pawpaw jelly or Muscadine grape jam.

Synchronize your products with local harvest festivals. Does your town have an apple festival? That's the time to offer every apple product imaginable, apple pie, apple jelly, dried apples, savory apples, apple butter, and more.

Or find a niche that other homemade food makers have overlooked. Be the vendor who sells baked goods for dessert at a barbecue cook-off. Or be the seller at a farmers market who always has a hard to find food in stock.

Use the Internet to bolster home food sales

Internet sales are tricky for homemade food sales. The federal government won't let you use your website to sell homemade food across state lines. Some states are OK with using websites to arrange food sales, as long as you deliver the food in person. A few states don't allow online sales of homemade food at all.

But you can always use a web page to show photos of your delicious homemade food. You can always post a blog about local food news, or your helpful hints about how to make the kinds of homemade food you sell. Most people will take one look at how hard it is to make great homemade food and become your customers forever.

There will be a few people who try to steal your ideas. Just know that if they have to steal the idea for their homemade food, they probably will face other challenges.

Use your Internet presence to funnel customers to your preferred point of contact. Keep customers constantly aware of how they can get your great homemade food.

Set up a website with Castiron to sell your homemade food online today!