So You Wanna: Start a Food or Beverage Business

A pick-your-own-path guide to launching and sustaining a successful food or beverage business

The specialty food and beverage business is a thriving industry, and the barriers to entry are low: all you need is a recipe idea and a place to make it. It sounds simple, but launching a food or beverage company is a maze of choices and consequences. Douglas Raggio has been there, both as a food business founder and as a consultant to other successful start-ups, and he’s come to learn that every choice a food founder makes has a fairly predictable outcome.
 
In So You Wanna: Start a Food or Beverage Business, he helps you think through the many decisions you’ll make along the road from idea to success—whether you see yourself building a following at your farmer’s market, partnering with a local restaurant, or launching the next Pepsi. 
 
This innovative guide follows four archetypal food start-ups that cover a range of business ideas and founders. Every few pages, you’ll make crucial decisions about the next step to take in growing a hypothetical business. You’ll have a chance to see how each choice is likely to play out before you try out anything in the real world, where the stakes are higher.
 
In this book, you’ll see the maze of choices and outcomes that go into:

Coming up with an exciting, profitable new product

Funding your start-up

Conducting market research

Pricing and producing to scale

Establishing partnerships, promotions, and branding

Deciding when to keep going—and when to fold

 
By understanding the perils and pleasures of this fast-growing industry, you will be able to approach your own business with confidence, make the decisions that feel right to you, and avoid the most common pitfalls along the way.