So You Wanna: Start a Food or Beverage Business: A Pick-Your-Path Business Book

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.

Author: Douglas Raggio
Publisher: Matt Holt
Published: 03/01/2022
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.14w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9781953295668
ISBN10: 1953295665
BISAC Categories:
- Business & Economics | Industries | Food Industry
- Business & Economics | Entrepreneurship
- Business & Economics | Development | Business Development

About the Author
In addition to having launched his own thriving specialty food company, Douglas Raggio is experienced in every aspect of the $150 billion specialty food industry. As the founder of a private equity group focused on healthy food and beverage branded companies, he's been part of three dozen transactions totaling more than $150M. He's also been an advisor to more than 100 startups, and is a regular speaker at North America's largest specialty food trade shows, often sought out for his wariness of venture capital funding. Earlier this year, Natural Products West attracted 86,000 visitors and 3,600 exhibitors.

Douglas's unorthodox prescription for building a specialty food company with permanence, based on decades of experience helping entrepreneurs build successful startups, comes from a lifetime of contrarian thinking. Douglas was one of the first artificially inseminated children in the United States. To small-minded people in the 1970s, that meant he wasn't a creation of God, but of man, and he consequently was bullied at school and excluded from recess and after-school programs. Douglas believes he emerged from these early experiences with an anti-establishment mindset, comfortable with playing by his own rules. In fact, underneath his email signature, he quotes General George Patton: If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.