Hi, my name is Tique Chandler. I'm the founder of Chandler honey.
I'm 26 years old and I'm here in Toronto, Canada. Today.
I'm going to be giving you five business ideas of food and beverage businesses
that you can start today from home. If you'd like,
and you can do this during or after the pandemic.
Chandler honey is a collection of infused honey products,
all with Canadian honey, from my family's farm,
I launched Chandler honey in November of 2020 in the middle of a pandemic.
On my first day,
I made $2,700 in revenue and I'm now averaging $10,000 a month in
revenue.
I've moved out of my apartment and finally have my own dedicated honey space.
Trust me if I can do this, you can do this too.
I've always had to think about how COVID would affect my business because people
are buying and trying food in really different ways.
Now they have to see it with their eyes and read stories about it.
Before they take that leap to buy it.
And that's something that's really unique to the situation we're in now.
From my experience, and you've probably noticed this too,
is that home chefs are cooking from home more and Hunter,
which is a food and beverage consulting agency have found that 51% of people are
cooking from home more often and 71% of those people plan to continue this
trend even after the pandemic is over. So you can really grab onto this idea,
by catering, a new product to these home chefs.
Maybe they need a new and exciting spice blend that you can create from your
very own kitchen. So to get started with a spice business,
you don't really need a lot of materials. You need the spices themselves.
You need some packaging, you need labels,
but in order to really get it in front of customers,
you can leverage your connections on social media.
When I was developing recipes for Chandler, honey,
I tested so many different products.
I had actually 30 different products that I wanted to choose from in order to
narrow it down to my top five.
So I'm mixed 30 different flavors of honey and then made anyone who would
listen to me, anyone who came in contact with me,
try all of the flavors and tell me which ones they liked best.
And if they would tweak any of the recipes.
By the end of having all of this feedback from family and friends,
there were about seven that were consistently being placed in the top five.
And from there,
I just kind of trusted my gut and knew that I would have to make a business
decision, to create my top five products, which I sell today.
Another easy to start food business is single serving snacks. Think about it.
This pandemic, you might be reaching for a lot more snacks than usual,
and maybe you don't want to get a whole bag of chips because you're either going
to eat the whole bag where you're going to be eating stale chips at some point.
Uh,
so maybe having a smaller bag of chips or a single serving snacks of any kind
would be really helpful.
The nice thing about this idea as with some of these other ideas is that you're
not inventing anything new necessarily.
You're focused mostly on branding and packaging by having these same snacks that
maybe you're already eating put in an interesting new way in smaller
containers with beautiful packaging.
I think customers would really resonate with that.
Let's talk a little bit more about packaging for your small business. Now,
when I was starting out with Chandler honey,
I made sure to get quotes from as many different places as possible. Um,
and this is really important to get the best price for your packaging,
but also so that you can get lots of samples and feel what you actually want in
your product.
One thing to note is that a lot of this information is not Googleable and not
easily found on the internet.
So you might have to pick up the phone or send some cold emails in order to get
some quotes, but it might be a little scary at.
First, but once you get into.
The swing of it, it's really not so bad.
Packaging is extremely important to a customer.
Think about it when you're a consumer yourself,
you like to feel a product and it really gives you a sense for what this product
is trying to convey. Is it a convenience product? Is it a luxury product?
Is it a recyclable product?
All of these things are really important to think about when you're creating
your packaging. But what was also important for me was the drop test.
A lot of glass is really shatterable and I'm sending honey all across
Canada and the United States. So I really needed to have a durable glass.
So when I was getting samples for my glasses, I would perform a drop test,
either empty or with honey in the jars to make sure that I was picking the one
that was the sturdiest. And this has been super successful if I might say,
because in all of my shipping across Canada and the United States,
I have yet to have a customer complain that a jar was shattered when it arrived.
Another
great idea is for luxury teas, as more of us are working from home,
which is a trend that I expect to continue on, even after the pandemic is over,
more of us are brewing the perfect cup of coffee and tea, right from home.
It's an escape from your day-to-day Workday.
And as people value this perfect cup of tea, more and more,
I believe that they're interested in investing a little bit of more money and
time into brewing that perfect cup. This is where you can come in.
I think this could be a particularly inexpensive idea to get running with.
Let's say you have $300 to spend.
I believe that you could get a minimum viable product out and into market
testing so that you can see if this is an idea you'd like to pursue further.
So let's take your $300, maybe $9.
A bag of that will be for tea leaves.
You can get 30 bags of tea for these $300 and still have room in your budget
for labels and paper bags.
Let's say those are 50 cents each adding you to a full
$10 per bag.
This will give you 30 bags that you can test out with family and friends or
through your Shopify store so that you can get as much feedback as possible on
what is good about your Teas. What needs a little bit of improvement.
And if this is an Avenue you'd like to go down,
labels are such an underrated important part of your business.
If you think about it,
it's the first thing people notice when they look at your product,
especially in the age of COVID, when they can't necessarily feel your packaging,
they can still look at the label and go, wow.
This person has really thought about their product and has poured a lot of love
into their business. So like packaging,
when I was exploring different options for labels,
I reached out to about five different companies and was looking at quotes,
but I didn't know how little I knew about labels until after I had started
exploring. And there's a lot to it.
You have to think about what material you want your label to be made out of.
If you need it to be durable with sticky fingers or wet fingers,
if you need it to be tearable so that people can have like a,
a fresh seal on their product, you need to know if it needs to be recyclable.
All these different things are something you need to think about and take into
account for your small business. In the age of COVID,
we have to get a little more creative in how we send gifts to our friends and
family. Um, when they have big milestones such as promotions, engagements,
birthdays, et cetera. Uh,
and so I personally have been sending a lot more gifts in the mail.
So I think an interesting idea is to have Instagram worthy sweets that you can
send out to people to congratulate them on the big things that are happening in
their lives. I've noticed a big trend in even food box companies,
making sure charcurterie boards or having a selection of really luxurious
goods, all in one package that they can send to others for these big milestones.
And I think you can really capitalize on this by creating your own Instagram
worthy sweets,
that people are proud to show on social media and happy to receive when they hit
these big milestones.
And these wow were these sweets can have really high profit margins,
because think about it.
People who are buying these sweets are more interested in the experience rather
than getting a good deal, for example.
So you can Jack up the price a little bit.
There's something so visceral about seeing a product and being so in love
with the packaging and how the product is speaks to you on a visual level that
you want to share it with all your friends.
And this is something that you could capitalize on in your product,
making it beautiful and a luxurious experience so that people really want to
share it.
Think about your experience with buying maple syrup is the package especially
beautiful.
Do you have a family story that you're resonating with from my experience, no.
These all look fairly generic and are in these,
weird bottles with tiny handles that I don't know what customer would want to
buy. However, maple syrup is a pantry staple,
so people are still clearly buying maple syrup.
And also when tourists come to Canada,
they always take back five to 10 little bottles of maple syrup.
So there must be a better way to make a product with a good story.
And with branding that grabs in a customer and makes them proud to buy the maple
syrup, rather than just settling for the one that they see at the supermarket.
Like honey maple syrup can be bought in large quantities directly from farms for
a much cheaper price than what you'd be seeing at the supermarket.
So there's a lot of money to be made in between buying it in bulk and selling it
to the final customer. From some quick Googling.
It looks like bulk prices of maple syrup is about $2 for the maple syrup
for 250 grams. If you're buying it, these bulk prices.
Yet at the store for the same size container,
250 grams they're selling for about $10.
There's some big money to be made in the middle there. In my opinion,
I think a great idea would be to infuse the maple syrup products with different
flavors to make a really unique customer experience,
much like I've done with my honey.
COVID has been particularly challenging for food and beverage businesses because
we've changed the way that customers look at and buy food.
They can no longer taste the product or have any samples.
They need to rely on what they're seeing with their eyes in order to taste the
product before they even get it to their homes. In order to get around this,
I found that I needed to invest extra time into my Shopify page to make sure
customers know exactly what they're getting out of my product and can envision
using it without even trying it.
So this means that I've put some recipes and blogs on my post.
I've made sure to include really vivid descriptions on all my products and I've
invested more in product photography so people can get really a good,
overall view of my products without even having tasted it.
So this is where a social media presence is super important because you're
building trust with those customers before they even buy your product,
show them recipes, show them really beautiful pictures,
show them really vivid descriptions of your products and they're that much more
likely to buy. And then once they buy the first time,
they'll see how delicious your product is and there'll be lifetime customers.
Let me know what you thought about this list in the comments down below and make
sure to like this video and subscribe to Shopify as YouTube channel for more
small business tips,
you can check out my Shopify page @chandlerhoney.ca or keep up with me on
Instagram @Chandler.honey.
Don't be shy and leaving me a DM or an email because I love talking with young
entrepreneurs.
Thanks so much for watching the world needs more entrepreneurs like you.
So go out and start your business.