Start a Frozen Food Manufacturing Company

A frozen food manufacturing company makes and sells a range of frozen food that is thawed and cooked by the consumer, the margins are fantastic in this business: some dough with food inside and you have a product, but the challenge is growing it pass the micro business stage.

Business Model
This is a manufacturing business, where you purchase raw materials, flour, vegetables, meats and turn it into a product that is sold.

Products
When starting small, businesses stick to basic, uncomplicated foods, afterwards they look at more complicated such as complete meals if (and only if) it is viable to do so. For small businesses this usually means:
Foods
Spring rolls
Pizza bases (plain) and basic pizza like totato & cheese and Margherita
Samoosas
Roti (only the bread)

• Frozen vegetables is also something to look into but that is a bit of a different discipline than foods.
• I have even seen frozen omelettes being sold, but I don’t know how popular that will be locally (I can’t personally see myself eating it).

Desserts
Waffles
Crumpets
Pancakes
Doughnuts

Frozen pancakes & waffles – O’Boy! Organic

Target Market
Depending on your size this can be either a retail business or a wholesale business. If retail you sell it to the consumer/end user, wholesale you will sell to shops to resell (either frozen or to be sold ready to eat at food stalls). Selling wholesale will depend on whether fulfil wholesale orders, which for a small business is not a simple matter, that is because to sell wholesale you need to sell it for cheap enough so there is enough profit to be made for the reseller. This means you need to be able to buy your ingredients in bulk in order to be able to charge less and pass on that savings to the retailer (which will require capital upfront). If you cannot do this then you might as well sell retail as you could end up overworking yourself to fulfil wholesale orders and not making enough to grow your business as your profit margins are too small.

Sales and Marketing:
You have to remember than when you are selling retail and when you are selling wholesale, you are dealing with two different markets which means two different strategies. One is B2C (business to consumer), the other is B2B (business to business). Remember, different target markets might need different types of marketing activities to get your product in front of them. This means that your sales and marketing strategy has to be different for each. If you selling retail to your local community you can put a ad up in the local library but you wont get anywhere with that strategy if you selling B2B as how many business owners frequent the local library? Marketing your business online is then a better approach for B2B.

Image credits: lsfoods, O’Boy Organic