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This week's agenda:

• Very Good Waffles

• How To Build It

• Viability Score

Very Good Waffles

Let’s talk food business (and one that I’ve done myself). Food is my least favorite category to sell. I compare selling food to selling grenades with the pins pulled. Due to short shelf life (food expiration) you have to move product quick or it goes bad. This doesn’t apply to software, hardware, apparel, services etc so it really is the hardest category to sell.

I make a mean waffle, often heard as the best waffle people have ever had. Often I would go to the farmers markets and see the lines of people buying food and thought “I could do that”. It was also already a proven concept in Belgium, where you can find waffle stands on the corner of every neighborhood.

“I should make a waffle cart and sell waffles”. Below are the actual steps I took to create this vision and how I would’ve scaled it to be a much bigger business.

What would this look like?

The final product of this is fairly simple, a food truck or stand to sell waffles from. You create a simple menu (I like to keep 5 options max and do those really well), have multiple locations to sell (I did farmers markets, cafes and bars (go where the people already are)). You have a commercial kitchen for all the prep (some people can use their actual food truck as a commercial kitchen.

And then you just sell at the agreed upon locations. Have a website or social media where people know where to find you and maintain the relationships of the people managing the locations.

How Would You Build It?

• I was everyones favorite co-worker. I brought in waffles for my co-workers to taste test and they would tell me which ingredients created the best waffle for flavor, texture, etc.

• After getting a solid recipe and menu options, I HOUNDED the farmers market manager to get me a spot. I would bring him waffles every week he was around until he said yes. AND IT WORKED.

• I reached out to EVERY bakery in my area to get a space to prep the waffles (since you’ll need a commercial kitchen)

  • One said yes! Shout out to Sea Wolf Bakers (they are amazing)

• I scraped together the basics; table, signage, waffle irons, napkins and started selling within a couple of weeks.

• After getting some traction (and hired a friend to take pics) I reached out to local coffee shops and breweries to sell in front of their locations. (I made the most money at coffee shops)

How Would You Scale Up?

After getting traction and brand recognition, you can start reaching out to more and more shops. This is where you’ll need to hire help and buy more equipment.

One organization reached out to ME after trying some waffles. They were a farmers market association. These guys owned dozens of farmers markets and asked if I could handle 1000 tickets per day (1000 orders). Find people like this. I call it the bottleneck, where all of your customers are going to be.

One thing I wanted to do but didn’t get around to it was setting up a “mini franchise”. How it would work is I would have set equipment, signage and menus for cafes to use and sell my branded waffles. They would pay a yearly franchise fee and would get all of the branding and equipment at a discount.

Another way I wanted to scale up was to sell “made to cook waffles”. These waffles are prepped into dough balls and can also be frozen for a set amount of time. If you freeze them and can package them safely, you can sell these via the mail or through food delivery. Anyone with a waffle iron can have fresh delicious waffles whenever they wanted.

Finally, opening a brick and mortar cafe/restaurant is the final FINAL form. Once you can get one of these going and obsess over your processes, you can go about opening these up across the country

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

This process was simple but hard work. Prepping, selling, breaking down and clean up is a TOUGH process when you’re working full time.

But once you get great processes and get to a place to hire help, this can be a VERY lucrative business.

People love food and having a product under $20 makes it a lot easier for people to give you disposable income, especially for a delicious snack.

Locations are always looking for food trucks/stands to sell to customers because setting that up themselves is much more complicated and costly vs hiring someone to sell to THEIR customers.

As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉 

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike

 👋