It’s the Great British Bake Off time, hurrah. Much as summer is my favourite season, enjoying Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood judge tasty treats definitely makes autumn more palatable.
It’s refreshing, in this world of celebrity chefs, to see amateur baking contestants showing their considerable talents to the nation.
I know too, from personal experience, that there are many amateur cooks who are doing great things in their kitchen at home and are desperate to showcase their tried-and-tested recipes.
Not everyone gets national television exposure to kickstart their baking career though, so how do you monetise your skills? Could you turn your passion for food into an income? Where on earth do you start?
These are the questions I asked myself when I was thinking about taking a recipe to market. I created a smoked hummus dish for my young family three years ago and found it went down so well with children, friends and dinner guests that I decided it could succeed as an artisan retail product.
A lot has happened in the three years since, and now my kitchen table creation is stocked in retailers such as Waitrose, and on British Airways flights.
So if The Great British Bake Off has inspired your creative culinary juices, or you’re looking for a way out of the rat race and want to work for yourself, here are my tips on the keys things you need to do.
A great way to start is to take daily action in small steps:
- Find the right product for the market – make sure it’s different or better, or ideally both. To find out if you have a unique product you need to do some research. Start with an internet search and then look in your local delicatessens, farm shops and health stores to see what sort of brands they have on the shelves. Another great way to find out if anyone is already selling a product like yours is to look at Ocado. It stocks a wide range of premium products, so if anyone out there is doing it well enough to be considered competition, they will be on the site.
- Taste test it - make sure people don’t just like your product, get them to love it. You do this by conducting taste tests and acting on the feedback until it is perfect.
- Test the shelf life of your product. You can do your own basic testing but to sell your products you should turn to the numerous companies that offer laboratory testing.
- Find out where you can make your products – sometimes your home kitchen will be suitable, but if it’s not there are plenty of other places where you can make your product in a legally compliant setting. Using Google as your best friend, look for opportunities to share a professional kitchen with someone who already uses one but doesn’t need it all the time. A small local factory might let you make it there, which is what I did when I started out. Some towns and cities even have their own food production kitchens to hire. An internet search is the best way to find out what’s available in your area.
- Get your product retail ready – this includes knowing how to label your products, getting barcodes and marking out allergen information.
- Like the product, the naming and branding need to be unique and stand out on the shelves. You also need to protect these – apply for a trademark, or seek help if you’d rather someone else did it for you.
- Pricing is crucial: you need to factor in all your costs properly and get your margins right to stand you in good stead.
- It’s one thing to get your products stocked in a retailer but another to make sure it stays there. If your product sells it stays, if it doesn’t it goes. Good sales and marketing activity is the way to stay ahead of the game.
Julie Waddell is the founder of the Little Smoked Food Company, which makes Moorish smoked hummus and a selection of dips, and The Little Food Academy
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