How To Launch Your Own Food Products

"Can you please tell me how to get my food products to the public?"

I get asked this question about 30 times a year, so I am now making a list of how to do this. It works with any food product. If you're not in the USA or are in rural USA, these steps can be more difficult.

Here are my credentials:
Sauces: http://TheBestSauces.com
Cooking With Jack: http://Youtube.com/jakatak69
Jack on The go Show: http://Youtube.com/jackonthego
Feel free to share this with anyone. It's the steps I do and have learned in my experience.

1. Find a food technician. Have her sign a NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT (NDA) which protects your recipe.  A food tech will bring you into a controlled environment and watch you make your recipe. She/he will measure and document each ingredient. Then will create your formula and give you nutritions list and ingredients list for your label. $200 - $500 an hour. should only take about 4-5 hours.

2. Find a Manufacturer. The term to search for is co-packers. These are the guys that make, label and box your product. Have them sign an NDA, then give them the formula and tell them the packaging you desire. Look through catalogs and pick something that is readily available to your co-packer so cost will be low for packaging.

3. Find Customers. Once you have a per unit price on your product you then need to go home and make a big batch of your product. Go store to store and sample it to the buyers of the store. Ask them if they would carry your product once it's made. MAKE SURE YOU SAMPLE TO THE PERSON WHO HAS THE POWER TO SAY YES AND NO  ONE ELSE. NEVER GIVE/LEAVE WHOLE BOTTLES.

4. Get Product Liability Insurance on your food product. If you can afford to Incorporate then do so. You want to protect yourself from someone dying from your product. (worst case scenario) My insurance is about $1000 a year.

5. Do the smallest manufacturing run you can once you have at least 5 committed stores. You should not make more than 70-100 cases. The shorter the shelf life the less you want to make.

6. Deliver to stores.

Here are a few more tips to marketing your product.

• Get more stores to carry you. Start with small independent stores and small chain stores (between 4-5 locations)
• Sell at the local flea market, swap meet or farmers market. We moved about 200 jars of sauce on a Sunday afternoon.
• Sell on a website. 
• Launch social media pages for your products.
• Get magazines, newspaper food reviewers to write about your product. Send them a sample.
• Get food bloggers to write about your product. Send them a sample.
• Never stop marketing your sauce. Wear hats, shirts and talk about it all the time.
• Best Tip: Wrap your car to advertise your product. No one really does this still and I get 8000 views a month on my wrap job. Cost of wrap: $1500. 8000 views X 12 months X 5 years live span = 480,000 views of your product. Worth every penny. I've sold enough product out of my wrapped car to pay for the wrap 3 times already.

I hope this helps someone. I am very blessed to be where I am at and I want to help as many people as possible. God bless!