It’s easy to underestimate the difficulty of growing your food business. On the face of it, to grow a business means working harder, selling more products, and employing more staff, right?
Wrong.
While these are side effects of growing your food business, there are many areas you’ll need to look at first if you’re going to build your food business way faster.
Here are five simple steps you need to take to grow your food business:
Table of Contents
Improve Hygiene Standards
This should go without saying, but improving your hygiene standards is a cornerstone to your business growth.
You want to be producing only the highest quality food. Customers are increasingly aware of where their food comes from and it’s quality, so you don’t want to risk time-consuming (and brand destroying) recall scandals and a drop in sales.
Another reason to improve your hygiene standards is to increase the productivity of your production line. Just as you work better when your desk is neat and orderly, so do production staff work at a faster pace when their work station is clean and tidy. It also lowers the risk of mistakes and makes it easier to enforce quality control processes.
Use Automated Services
One way to transform your production process is to use automated equipment. For example, you could incorporate a conveyor belt. The type of belt you need will depend on what you produce and how you make it, but there is a conveyor that suits most uses.
Using automated technology like a conveyor will speed up your productivity, increase hygiene standards, and tidy the workplace up. You can find out more by checking out Conveyors in Montgomery by Fluent Conveyors, Inc.
Simplify Your Foodstuffs
Let’s say your business produces ready-made pizzas. You would need to be as specific as possible about which toppings you use, how much you use on each pizza, and how large the pizzas are in the first place. To increase efficiency, you’d want to find the optimum amount of toppings per pizza to save on costs, increase production quantities, and supply customers with a pizza they love every single time.
To do this, you’ll want to simplify which products you offer. There’s little point in storing huge amounts of ingredients if you have very little demand for those toppings.
Simplifying what you offer also allows you to train your staff in specific product production, focusing your efforts on making specific products the best on the market, rather than offering a huge range of average foods. This also helps maintain all-important quality control and helps your brand stand out to consumers.
Improve Customer Service
An amazingly easy way to rapidly grow your food business is to offer unparalleled customer service. This is especially important with food brands because consumers buy for the experience as much as the food itself. Make sure you offer each customer an experience to remember. If you have a restaurant or store, train your staff to treat customers like royalty, remembering their names and making every second an adventure. This method is powerful even if you just package frozen goods for grocery stores.
Think outside the box by offering discounts, striking up personable relationships with customers, and being ultra-hot on returns.
Offer Delivery Incentives
Another area you need to focus on to grow your food production business is distribution. Obviously, there are many different ways to distribute your product, whether you have franchised stores, offer delivery, or send it straight to a grocery store.
However, there are some simple techniques you can use to increase your distribution efficiency. For instance, going back to the pizza analogy, if you sell takeaway pizzas, you could offer discounts for customers buying in-store, or if you work directly with food chains, give your customers discounts for buying in bulk.
This will encourage customers to either buy more or cut down on costly and time-consuming delivery services.
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