As a new generation of Londoners passes up long restaurant lunches in favour of adventurous food truck cuisine, entrepreneurs from all walks of life are reinventing themselves as food business owners. If you’re new to the food industry, or are thinking of making your culinary dream come true, here are four resource management tips that will get your business off to a great start.
1. Professional Cooking is a Process – You’ll Need to Understand and Master it
Many food entrepreneurs are inspired to start their own businesses by friends and relatives who are blown away by their tasty home cooking. The ability to cook well is definitely a good start for any food business owner, but there is a difference between cooking for five people and catering for five hundred.
In order to scale up your cooking, you’ll need to analyse the process that goes into preparing each dish, with exact quantities of ingredients and a realistic cooking time estimate. By looking at each step of the process and each ingredient in detail, you’ll find more efficient and cost-effective ways of creating your signature dishes.
If you don’t have a formal education, or a very basic one, you should at least consider specialising in your main field of expertise. This might mean investing in a few crash courses or something more serious.
2. Surround Yourself with the Best Team You Can Afford
As soon as your food business is big enough to require extra assistants, you’ll be faced with a difficult decision. While it’s important to keep costs low at the outset, the last thing you want to do is hire an inexperienced or untrustworthy staff member who ends up ruining dishes, alienating customers, and jeopardising your brand.
As a rule of thumb, you’re better off with a few like-minded professionals on your team than a lot of amateurs. This doesn’t just apply to chefs and kitchen staff, but also to your waiters, delivery staff, and business service providers like lawyers and accountants.
3. Work with the Best Equipment Within Your Budget
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to fill large food orders with unreliable or inadequate kitchen equipment – but buying top of the range equipment is out of reach for most new food business owners.
To keep costs low while having the best equipment to work with, you should consider renting kitchen space from a service like FoodStars. This innovative London-based startup provides top catering facilities to a variety of foodpreneurs (including GymFood and Dayan & Webb) on a monthly rental basis.
4. Customer Satisfaction Always Comes First
Sometimes entrepreneurs are so caught up in making their businesses succeed that they forget the real purpose of any good food business: sharing their passion for creative, delicious food with their customers.
Producing mouth watering dishes and winning the support of your customers through exceptional service is a must – and this can only be achieved if every single member of your team places customer satisfaction at the top of their list of priorities. This is why extreme detail should be given to the selection and training of your staff to make sure that you all share the same vision and move towards the same objective.
Conclusion
The trend for tasty, innovative cooking start-ups in London is huge – and it’s just getting started. If you’d like to share your passion for food with customers who are waiting to be wowed by the culinary experience you have to offer, now may be the best time to start your own food business. Keep our four tips in mind as you start and grow your exciting new start-up.
