Launching a new food product in a highly competitive marketplace isn’t easy.
You need commitment and focus to ensure that you’re not only going to get your product onto supermarket, grocery, or retailer shelves, but you’re going to sell it too. A great idea and a delicious flavour are essential to developing a food product – but it’s only the first step. After you’ve decided what you’re going to sell, you also need to take a few careful steps to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success.
Here are 5 tips that will guide you towards truly delicious results for your food venture.
1. Research your Market
Before you even start designing the concept for your food product, you need to know your market. Without a thorough understanding of your audience, you’ll struggle to find a USP that really speaks to today’s buyer. A great way to make sure that you’re not investing time and effort into a product that won’t work is to invest in a market audit.
At Dynamic Retail Services, we offer a retail market audit to give our clients everything from information about retailer required margins to a competitive environment synopsis.
2. Make Sure your Food has a Distinct USP
Once you’ve done your research, you’ll know that it takes more than just a delicious product to make an impact on the food market. If you want to get customers to experience and fall in love with your products, then you need to position your item as something unlike anything else on the marketplace today.
An account manager could help you to think more carefully about your USP. However, to begin with, it’s a good idea to look at the problems your customers are facing, and the possible gaps in the market you may be able to fill.
3. Start Small and Scale Up
It’s easy to get carried away when you’re launching your food product for the first time. However, it’s important to start small, so you don’t take on more than you can reasonably handle. Instead of jumping into too much too fast, organize your business so you can scale up gradually as your sales increase.
As your business continues to grow, there’s a good chance that you’ll want to start working with a specialist food distributor so that you can get your product onto a wider range of shelves. Eventually, you might even decide to work with international experts to export your product to other countries.
4. Remember Great Packaging
Although you may think that the taste of your food product speaks for itself, you’ll still need to design amazing packaging that tempts customers to pick you over your competitors. Depending on whether you’re going into private or white label development, the amount of control you have over your packaging will vary.
No matter what you do, make sure that you pay attention to the trends of the market and the preferences of your target customers. It’s also worth getting to know the rules around packaging, so you understand what kind of information you need to include on your products.
5. Have a Marketing Plan
Finally, make sure that you have a strategy in place for how you’re going to advertise your product. Look at your competitors carefully and think about how you can separate yourself from them in the eyes of your customers. Find any weaknesses that your competitors might have, and work on making that your strength.
While some retailers will be happy to do some of your advertising for you, most will expect you to have a promotional plan that you can use to drive people towards their store. Want to learn more about launching a successful food product? Get in touch with Dynamic Retail today!
