Ins and Outs of a Craft Food Startup with Mrs. Marcys Homemades

08/08/22 • 27 min

Good Food Marketing with The Virginia Foodie

Do you enjoy cooking? Did you have a eureka moment while working in your kitchen? Are you ready to turn your culinary skills into a full-fledged business? Launching a food business from home can be daunting, and you need more than just your passion for your product for your new brand to be a success.

Marcy Thornhill ventured into a food business that she never knew would bring her applesauce to different stores and even to other parts of the world. What started as a simple canning hobby quickly became a regional favorite in local stores. But, just like anyone in the food industry who starts a brand, it is acceptable to not know the whole road ahead. It is common to learn as you go along in building your brand. But, people must not forget to pause for a while to ask how far they want to go with their product.

In this episode, Marcy shares her interesting and exciting journey after her eureka moment while canning applesauce. She uncovers the process and challenges of manufacturing her products, designing a label, and distributing her homemade goods. She also affirms that starting a small business might be scary at first because you know what you don’t know, but if you are willing to learn, observe and know when to ask for help from the right people, this challenging journey will be worthwhile.

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

The scary part is not knowing what you don't know and wanting to partner with the right people who are going to really take your vision, help you to formulate it in a way that makes sense because they understand it. - Marcy Thornhill
Anyone who starts on this journey doesn't know what they don't know, and they are learning as they go. - Georgiana Dearing
Sometimes small brands try to pretend they're bigger than they are. You don't have to, because if you pretend, you're just going to get burned. - Georgiana Dearing

Key Points From This Episode:

Not letting a wall stop you and arming yourself with some education are good tenets of an entrepreneur.
There are many regulations to selling your craft food at retail, and there are specific guidelines for package design.
Small brands should not pretend they're bigger than they are because they will just suffer the consequences.
Research and education will keep you prepared for when an opportunity to partner with another sales or distribution channel comes along.
In the food industry, there are so many choices to make. There are so many directions you can grow your sales. Focusing on one channel at a time is key to steady, measured growth.
Growth has consequences, and it is important to regularly stop and think about how big you want to be.
A good co-packer is a manufacturing partner who will honor your recipes, and your process. They’ll be committed keeping your quality high, but allow you to be the brand owner with the vision and direction for your food products.
When a business is growing, business owners have to be prepared to shift from their old ways to new and innovative ways.

Other Resources Mentioned:

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

Support the show

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

The scary part is not knowing what you don't know and wanting to partner with the right people who are going to really take your vision, help you to formulate it in a way that makes sense because they understand it. - Marcy Thornhill
Anyone who starts on this journey doesn't know what they don't know, and they are learning as they go. - Georgiana Dearing
Sometimes small brands try to pretend they're bigger than they are. You don't have to, because if you pretend, you're just going to get burned. - Georgiana Dearing

Key Points From This Episode:

Not letting a wall stop you and arming yourself with some education are good tenets of an entrepreneur.
There are many regulations to selling your craft food at retail, and there are specific guidelines for package design.
Small brands should not pretend they're bigger than they are because they will just suffer the consequences.
Research and education will keep you prepared for when an opportunity to partner with another sales or distribution channel comes along.
In the food industry, there are so many choices to make. There are so many directions you can grow your sales. Focusing on one channel at a time is key to steady, measured growth.
Growth has consequences, and it is important to regularly stop and think about how big you want to be.
A good co-packer is a manufacturing partner who will honor your recipes, and your process. They’ll be committed keeping your quality high, but allow you to be the brand owner with the vision and direction for your food products.
When a business is growing, business owners have to be prepared to shift from their old ways to new and innovative ways.

Other Resources Mentioned:

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

Support the show

Previous Episode

A Sweet Start Up with Sugar Bear Cville

One of the scariest (or bravest) things a food brand could do is go straight from a recipe idea to the shelf. No market testing or selling in a specialty store. It’s every startup’s dream - or nightmare if done poorly!

Emily Harpster of SugarBear Cville has done just that, and her story is a great opportunity to learn about a startup retail brand in the very early stages of development. In this episode, we speak about some of the challenges most startup food brands face and why vision and determination play a huge role in achieving and sustaining success.

SugarBear is off to a good start, thanks to some careful plans Emily put in place for her product development. And it’s paid off so far – her ice cream quickly caught the attention of ice cream aficionados like me and other local establishments who are committed to living the good food, good people, good brand life.

Emily has graciously offered to keep us up to date with her progress as she tackles the challenge of building a strong regional brand. Listen to learn more about the behind-the-scenes and ups and downs of a locally sourced retail packaged food brand. It’s a rare opportunity to watch a new brand grow from its literal beginnings in retail, and you’ll get the inside scoop from a ringside seat.

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

Ice cream is a thing that really makes people happy. - Emily Harpster
Ice cream is a little bit disarming and really charming. A lot of times, when I share with people that I do ice cream, they want to tell me about their favorite ice cream memories or a happy story or their favorite flavor. And it's a really wonderful moment to have. - Emily Harpster
When you're running a scoop shop, you're running a restaurant. It's a location, it's the interior design, it's the staffing, and then you have to get the foot traffic. It's a whole different way to market your business. - Georgiana Dearing

Key Points From This Episode:

Charlottesville has a growing food scene that is beginning to rival nearby Richmond, Virginia.
SugarBear is carried by a fan favorite over on vafoodie.com, Maribette Cafe and Petite Maribette.
It’s essential to connect with like-minded brands to help establish your brand.
Startups with an eye at grocery retail should consider SugarBear’s approach and go straight to packaged retail products bypassing farmer’s market and pop-up shops.
Watching a new brand grow from its literal beginnings in retail is a chance to uncover answers to those burning questions:
- What makes a startup tick?
- What choices do startups face?
- What marketing challenges do they need to overcome during the first year as a startup food manufacturer?
Having a clear vision and determination can shift a dream to a goal with an actionable business plan.

More About the Guest:

Emily Harpster is the owner of SugarBear Cville, a very new, very fun and very local ice cream brand out of Charlottesville, Virginia. They make ice cream from scratch featuring central Virginia ingredients.
Connect with Emily Harpster/SugarBear

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

Support the show

Next Episode

Exploring Regenerative Agriculture with Daniel Griffith of Commons Provisions

There are plenty of organizations who are working with farmers on systems that facilitate the sale of local food. Many of these entrepreneurial ventures are often a hybrid of several business models, with business owners wearing many hats. Daniel Griffith is no different.

Part food hub, part grocery store, part certification agency, the eCommerce brand Commons Provisions is designed to get more good food to more people while keeping operational costs low. This model of the business is to pay farmers well above market rates for meat and other produce.

Daniel shares how Commons Provisions works with certified regenerative farmers without alienating the best, sustainable practices, both in farming and distribution. Learn more about how you can be part of this community-centered approach that highlights regenerative agriculture as the foundation for healthy and truly sustainable food production.

Virginia Foodie Essentials:

Regeneration is different because we're not looking at practice. What we're looking at are outcomes. And those outcomes are biodiversity. - Daniel Griffith
Our mission is to rebuild the food system from the ground up in a way that is both good for consumers, the land, and the farmers. Because it's very easy to build a food system that degrades the environment by abusing this class of farmers. And it's very easy to help local farmers without building a food system that is scalable for local consumers to participate. - Daniel Griffith
How dare we think that a farmer could ever raise enough cows to have a consistent inventory or cows in a pasture all year round when it's very snowy outside? Or maybe it's a drought. It's a system problem. This isn't a farmer's problem. - Daniel Griffith
Farmer-first focus means if the farmers can't grow the food, we can't possibly eat it! - Daniel Griffith
Our mission is to build a nose-to-tail solution for scaling regeneration by buying the whole animal. Because it's very hard for a farm to raise anything but the whole animal. - Daniel Griffith
As we get bigger, we get smaller. As we rescale regeneration by feeding more people and having more regenerative farms, it only feels smaller, more local, and more entirely common. - Daniel Griffith

Key Points From This Episode:

Good Food brands need healthy, profitable farms to provide their raw ingredients
Farming has very thin margins and farmers often have their backs against the wall to keep healthy, ethical farming as the norm
The Certified Organic farming model can be costly
Organic farming without addressing soil health ultimately stops being sustainable.
Regenerative farming addresses soil health
Commons Provisions is a subscription model with a hyper-local footprint. They are setting up a series of distribution hubs to create very short distances for food to travel.
Commons Provisions is like an online grocery store — they don't add branding on top of the farms' regular packaging
Theirs is a transparent business model - the shopper always knows which farm provided the product

Follow The Virginia Foodie here:

Support the show

Good Food Marketing with The Virginia Foodie - Ins and Outs of a Craft Food Startup with Mrs. Marcys Homemades

Transcript

Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies

[00:00:00] Marcy Thornhill: Partner with the right people who are gonna really take your vision, help you to formulate it in a way that makes sense because they understand, but guide you. Because I've come across a lot of people who's I can help and they can't, or they won't. That's where you get nervous.

[00:00:18] Georgiana Dearing: Welcome to the Virginia