How to Start a Frozen Food Business

Posted by Damian Roberti on September 26, 2020

If I'm looking to start a frozen food, dinner, business, or frozen food business at all, how do I get these frozen items to my customer? I'm going to give you some tips and pointers you may have never thought of, and we're going to jump into it right now.

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It is Damien from marketing food online. And in this video, I'm actually going to answer a question. I have gotten a lot of lately from many of the subscribers that I have on my marketing food channel. And by the way, really quick, if you are not subscribed and you are looking to start a profitable food business or a food truck, or even sell food from home or get online and sell food through Amazon, or what are the platforms like that you definitely want to hit that subscribe button to check out our 800 videos. So really quick, we had questions about frozen food and how do you ship that? So if you're really new to the business, maybe you're a chef, or maybe you're a cook. Maybe you've got a great recipe and you want to create a frozen food product. But as far as shipping goes, that's something totally new to you.

Listen to "How to start a Frozen Food Business Series Pitch your Food to Local Grocery Store" on Spreaker.

Well, I've been shipping food products for over 12 years now on eCommerce businesses. We've got six stores online and we still run them to this day. And at night I do my fantastic videos that you're watching here. So if you're looking to create a food business and it happens to be a frozen food business, there are a few things of it's severe importance to put it mildly that you need to be aware of before you begin to ship your frozen food product. So I'm going to dive into a few tips. These are not in any particular order. I'm just going to give these tips to you. There are a few things that you need to keep in mind as you start your frozen food shipping business. When you begin to ship it, okay. Obviously, number one, you want to make sure that you're doing it legally and legitimately.

Listen to "How to start a frozen food business Five Tips for Success" on Spreaker.

You don't want to be doing this from your house. If you're shipping a product over state lines, you really need to be in a commercial facility. Make sure you check with your County and city and make sure you've got the right permits and licenses and food, business insurance, and all that. I'm not going to dive too much into the legalities of having a food business because in the video here, it's going to be pretty good amount of time. I want you to watch it from beginning to end, because I'm going to actually give you some tips here. Then I'm going to go over to our shipping department and I'm actually going to show you how to package a box and give you a couple different variations and options for you to use. All right? So the first thing I want to jump into as far as what you need to know is number one, and this may sound kind of elemental, and you're going to say, well, Damien, that's a no brainer, but if you're still in the beginning stages of figuring out your packaging, that is something that's going to dictate how you're going to ship it.

And I keep stepping on somebody. There we go. And that's going to dictate how you ship it. And that's going to dictate also how big of a box and a lot of dynamics to shipping this properly safely and making sure that it arrives frozen. So if you are going to ship something like this, if it's in a box, it's a frozen dinner type of product. It's in a box. This will ship much differently than this. Of course, these are a bag of these, which I can't stand peas. My wife gets these all the time, but that's okay. A bag of peas. Now, this bag and this box, these packages actually ship much differently. Then larger case packs or even smaller versions. So if it's going to be bagged, it's going to have one method of shipping. If it's going to be box, it's going to have one, one, another method of shipping. Now, the first thing you want to do is definitely figure out how you're going to package it. After you do that, how are you going to sell it? Now? Here's what I mean by that. I know you're going to be selling it online. That's not what I mean. You need to figure out, are you going to

You're going to sell one of these. Are you going to sell three of them? If you're making an entree or something that could be boxed, are you going to sell it by the case pack? Okay. I highly recommend you do what I've done on. A lot of my actual websites is bundle. You're going to want to bundle these. You're not going to want to sell an individual unit. Let me set that down. And here is why, because when it comes to shipping a frozen food product, there is a lot of packaging installation, and obviously the dry ice that goes along with it. And the time it takes to package it, I mean, box it up and put it in the proper packaging. Now, if you're going to sell an individual item, like I just showed you, it is smarter to increase the actual transaction amount.

You don't want to sell one box. You want to really sell probably six or 12 or 10 something. That's going to bring that price point up to that medium price. I tell all of my clients when I do my consulting and a really quick plug, if you need help check out the link down below, and I do have one hour phone consultation. You could actually work with me directly and I can guide you and get you set in the right direction for your business. So if you're going to use a bundled idea, you want to make sure that that price points around 25 to $30 or even more. Because if you're going to go through packaging and all of the other, other aspects of getting this product to your customer and paying somebody to ship it, obviously you may have someone working in your shipping department or you may do it yourself.

Keep in mind. It takes time to do all of that properly. That takes time. So you have to pay somebody or you're going to pay yourself. If you're shipping a four or $5 item, because you're shipping one at a time, you're not going to make a profit. It's not going to be worth it. Plus customers will not pay shipping for only one or two items. They're going to want to get a bundle or at least a week's worth or a few days at a time. So keep that in mind. Well, all right. So as you already figured out your packaging, now you're bundling. You want to make sure, like I said, you get that dollar price point up to the point where it's really worth doing. It's worth you taking it out. A case of pack case pack of them and packaging them properly. Okay?

It's worth you going through creating a listing, selling the product on there, and you're making a good margin for every transaction. Think of it from the perspective of per transaction and the margin that you're going to make on that. Okay. And try to make that as high as you possibly can give people, incentives, maybe give them free shipping. If they buy a hundred dollars worth of product, you can give them free shipping. Maybe if they buy $50 worth of product, you get half off your shipping or something to that effect. That's going to make the price point worth it. Okay. So next up, when will you ship now coming from a guy? I don't ship, honestly, I don't ship frozen foods, but I have dealt with frozen foods before I don't shift from the food, but I do ship a freshly made baked good products, and I know how quickly I need to get those to customers.

So you need to find out when will you ship frozen foods? When you pack them, you need to have about a two day transit period and nothing longer. If you do, you're going to run the risk of having that dry ice turned into carbon dioxide, and it's not going to be anything in the box and it's going to get too hot and the Protestant methodical, and you're going to get some irritating customers and the cycle goes and you get credit and a refund. It's a big problem. So shipping your frozen food, I would highly recommend you do that on Mondays and Tuesdays. Why would I recommend that? Because if you ship a product on Thursday, sometimes there may be a day delay or there may be a time when it doesn't get there on time within two days. So you're going to do that. If you're shipping on Thursday, for instance, Friday and Saturday didn't get delivered, then Sunday's another day of delay.

Then it arrived on a Monday. Now you're three to even four days out. That's not a good thing. Monday to Tuesday gives you a little bit of a cushion because by Thursday or Friday, at the latest, if it happens to happen, it would be Saturday delivered for sure, because the two day priority sometimes runs three days. So if you've got a Tuesday pickup Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you're there. Okay. Keep that in mind as well. And how do you do that, Damien? How do I arrange that? So when you create a listing on your website for that particular product, you tell your customer on the listing, we ship every week on Mondays and Tuesdays. So it also does a great thing for you. It allows you to accumulate orders from Monday all the way to Sunday, and then process them on Monday and Tuesday. Okay. Which is another great thing.

What's going to lead me into my next point. My PowerPoint I have behind the camera there, my next point is suppliers. You need to find two to three suppliers close to your facility that offer dry ice and you need to get it and get it into your facility or into your products or into your boxes on that Monday and Tuesday. So if you're storing dry ice, which I highly recommend you do not do in a regular freezer, it does not keep it cold enough. And it can technically actually turn into carbon dioxide and due to the refrigeration process and the freezing process. And even whether or not that system that you have in your freezer is working right. You could damage the actual freezer itself. So by storing dry ice in a normal freezer, [inaudible] not a good idea. You could cause some serious problems. Okay?

Now, number five, arranging for your pickup time, by the way, number four was actually the power of the point. I just made about the ventilation. You want to make sure that you don't store it in a regular freezer. You could just keep it inside of its traditional styrofoam cooler, but make sure it's ventilated in not in a closed room space where other people are, because the carbon dioxide as the dry ice, uh, begins to, um, turn into carbon dioxide, it can fill a room up with that and it can be really a big problem. So make sure it's ventilated and make sure you have it in a cooler styrofoam. Cooler is fine, but again, you want to have it cracked a little bit, not sealed tightly, not completely closed off because it can also explode, but you want to make sure that you've got some ventilation or the lid just slightly off a little bit.

Okay. Keep it kind of loose. And also you want to do that when you ship as well. And I won't get into more of the shipping when we get over to the shipping department, I'll show you so arrange for a pickup time. Now, what does that mean? If you've got ups, FedEx or USP as the post office, what are those three or a combination of all of them. And I'm going to get into a little bit of, of the pricing, by the way, on the shipping in a few seconds, you want to arrange for them to be picked up. You want to arrange for them to pick up your product from your facility at a designated time. Okay. And that could be Monday at like two o'clock you've already got all your boxes set, or maybe it's Tuesday at two o'clock, whatever it may be, call them up.

And your local office, local branch. What have you tell them who you are, what you're doing. You've got a food business. You're going to be shipping products that have to get picked up and in the system, it out ASAP. Another great thing. That's going to allow you to arrange for the pickup time. So you have your employees or yourself, packaging and boxing, all of your products, a specific time, Monday and Tuesday. Yeah. Every single week. That way there's consistency with the pickup. Yeah. In the delivery. Plus it helps you also just monitor the timeframe and it's not something that's sporadic or just Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And they come in whenever they want try to designate a specific time for having them pick up your products. Now, number six, I wanted to hop into this. Alright, so this next step, next tip is going to be about experimenting.

This is not going to be a, uh, right off the bat. Something that's going to succeed by just doing it one simple way. You need to experiment. And I did this myself because I actually messed up quite a few orders. When I first started with some of the chocolate covered items that we had, I was trying to figure out how much ice. I don't use dry ice. I just use ice packs. And that is okay when you're using products that are not frozen. So what you need to do is figure out what size box what's I shipping box and how much of your product goes in it and what is the best way to insulate it. And would that be said, how much dry ice do I need? So if you happen to have a bundle, let's say you have a certain amount, three to five, to six or 10 units of product that takes X amount of dry ice because you experimented with it and you ship it to your friend.

Who's halfway across the country and it arrived. Perfect. Then you had a customer who ordered two or three cases. Now that's a bigger unit. Maybe you should break it up into multiple shipments. Keep that in mind as well, because you've got to figure out what, how much and what quantity of dry ice is going to work best for you, what you're shipping. And again, the more product that you can ship together, that's frozen food product. That's going to take smaller amounts of dries. Believe it or not because you're having more frozen food products shipped at the same box. And that actually is a good thing now where you need a lot less dry ice. I don't know. Nobody can, nobody can tell you that. I could not tell you that you need to experiment with it. So try it with some really small orders and then try it with some really big orders, how much dry ice is going to be beneficial for your product.

Okay. That takes me back to when I started the video. Is that the packaging? Is it going to be bagged or it's going to be box or container? Maybe it's a plastic container. How is that going to affect the amount of dry ice that you have plus your actual shipping costs? Okay. So these are a few tips, a few things to keep brainstormed about. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to wrap up this video. Cause I like to keep about 10 to 12 minutes. I'm going to do two more videos. I'm going to get over right now. We're going to do the second video is going to show you the packaging, how to actually physically put the product in the boxes or the insulated wrap. I'm going to show you two variations and I'm going to give you some examples of how to lay in and work with how to lay down the actual dry ice and how to package it.

Okay. So take out, take a look at this video. And of course, if this was helpful, let me know if you've got questions based on the information I just gave you as always let me know down below and I'll get to the questions as soon as I possibly can. So keep an eye out for the next two videos. It'll be the second one will be the packaging. And the third one will be some marketing tips and some pointers on how to promote your frozen food product. Before you get like a co-packer or get yourself into retail store. That's a whole nother ball game, but when you're starting your own business and your doing it yourself, yes, you can. But definitely take a look at the next two videos. Listen to that information. I'll show you how to package them and we'll get into some marketing tips and get you promote your product online.

So I hope that was helpful. That gives you a few tips and a few pointers and some things you may not have thought about when it comes to shipping frozen food. And as always, I appreciate you guys watching and I'll see you on the next video. Thanks for watching marketing food online. And if you are looking to create your own food truck started home-based food business. Under the cottage food law franchise, a food operation start a packaged food business, private label, your own food product, sell on Amazon, get your own online store or sell food online. Remember to subscribe and check out these videos for more resources, take care.

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