All right. So you've landed several retailers around the region, or even the country to carry your food product. Now make sure that you are legal and you've got the right permits and licenses that are needed for you to operate your food business. And of course, food business insurance. Now you need to get it. You need to get your product to them.
This is where you need to decide on the best method to ship your product, to ensure your product gets to the retailer intact the way you intended to look. You gotta be aware that a lot of carriers can damage food products, which costs you time, energy, and resources. And then you have to give the stores credit if they are requiring that as well, because either they've given you money upfront, or they'll give you net 30 or net 60 day terms, that's going to be something you need to be aware of.
One of the mentors I used was a company that produced product and showed me exactly how to ship it and how to arrive. So if you can find somebody who is close to you in the same industry, make sure you take advantage of their experience and see if they can assist you mail order specialty food retailer. For instance, uh, Omaha steaks has created a shipping model for their frozen meats to ensure safe delivery their products ship via overnight mail or flash frozen with dry ice inside a styrofoam shipping cooler recipients are instructed on the outside of the packaging to unpack and put the contents in the freezer as soon as they get it.
And it's received, not only do you need to decide on distribution range and packaging, but your facility needs to be able to accommodate the packing and shipping process. This is a whole different animal and totally different from creating the specialty food plan to sell. So once you can, if this is not something that revs you up and gets you excited, you may want to look at a different way of shipping your food product.
Planning your mobile menu, determining what to serve can be fun, but there are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to menu planning in the mobile food world. Here are a few, what do you know how to cook? And are you good at cooking? Peanut? What foods do you enjoy cooking? Because keep in mind, you will be cooking them all day long and maybe multiple days throughout the week. What foods are popular in your town County, city or region.
Be sure to do a little research and find out exactly be where you are and what foods normally sell very well in those areas. Sometimes introducing a new food that may not sell locally can be a problem. What ingredients are easy to get from wholesalers markets or farms in your area, check to see your sources? Where will you, you source your ingredients from, there are a lot of farms and local markets that love working with local food vendors, even food, truck businesses.
What foods are you eating? You get a transport to and from an on and off site of a commercial kitchen, keep in mind, you have to move the food that you make. If it's an ingredient onto the truck and it's bulky and cumbersome, it may be difficult. Cool for you to do a successful business and a food truck, because you have all of this stuff I have to carry around. And if you don't have the right storage, then it's becomes even more difficult to produce a product quick and easy and make it profitable. What can you prepare and or heat up without much time difficulty. Also what foods are ideally suited for your culinary expertise or allow you to try and creative new recipes. So tap into your audience in experience, cooking certain foods and then create a menu based upon that, because it will make it a lot easier for you because you will not have to learn new methods or techniques.
What foods can customers easily carry around with them. You got to keep in mind that it's going to be easy for your customers to carry it after you make it, it's gotta be handheld and something that can walk around while they're at a festival fair or some type of farmer's market and makes it easy for them to eat next up. Well, foods are potentially cost effective for you to sell. So make sure that you're creating a product with a huge profit margin, because some events are going to sell like crazy and other events. You're going to sell very little at a time. What foods are not being sold at a hundred other food trucks or mobile caterers. You got to keep in mind something that's unique too, because if there's a hundred trucks in the area that are selling hotdogs and hamburgers and fries, you are probably not going to stand out and your business will not be open very long.
Next up. What times of day will you be open for business? Are you going to serve dinner? Are you going to sort of just lunch? Are you going to be offering coffee and breakfast? Where are you going to sell? And what times of the day are you going to be in that location? Because that's going to dictate the type of food again that you're going to sell. And the amount of profit that's involved with it. A lot of times breakfast can be simpler because eggs are very inexpensive potatoes. Basic things like bagels are very, very cheap. So they would have huge profit margins. If you're making a dinner, then you're getting into proteins like fish steak and chickens, which costs much more money. And your margins are going to be a lot smaller. Are you going to specialize in one or two foods with several variations? So are you going to specialize in one particular thing and it just make it in a lot of different ways or are you going to have a very large menu? And it's going to be only one or two different variations from that. So these are some tips and to make sure that you make a cost effective menu, that's going to be profitable and also appeal to people in your area.
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