Dumpling Sauce Startup-Austin Tx

[dbirdez]

I enjoy cooking, especially Asian dishes. My friends have mentioned multiple times that my dumpling sauce is quite addictive and they could see on store shelves (it’s about 5 ingredients mixing other types of sauces together)

How should I go about testing this theory? I live in N.Austin/Domain area and there’s a Farmers market there on Saturdays. Should I just go out and start giving samples, or should I focus on potentially collaborating with other restaurants/dumpling companies in the area? Have always wanted to start a business, but unsure of the first step to get potential customer feedback

 

[georgewaini]

@dbirdez It’s much harder to make food/sauces taste the same after it’s been bottled for 12 months. You can probably do it if there is a demand but I would focus on selling it online and not locally

 

[dbirdez]

@georgewaini How will I convince them its good unless they try :/

 

[nursec]

@dbirdez Reviews!!!! Social media

 

[codegreen]

@dbirdez If all you’re looking for right now is feedback before you spend any money, you’ll have to stick with friends and family.

When you want to go legit, I think most brands start at a farmers market. As for a place to make it, there are commissary/commercial kitchens pretty much everywhere where you can pay by the hour, and I’m sure there’s a few in atx.

I googled ‘commercial kitchen for rent austin Texas’ and a bunch came up. Most if not all commercial kitchens and farmers markets will require you to have a business entity, insurance, etc to be there. Probably a managerial food safety certificate too (most common one is ServSafe). I guess you could try to loiter around and have people try your sauce but I’m sure most people would be sketched out and you’ll prob be told to leave eventually and burn bridges as the weird sauce guy.

The cpg industry is hard and sucks but can be extremely rewarding.

Probably the absolute minimum you’ll need to do it is an LLC, insurance, food safety certificate and a place to make it. Not sure of other Texas laws regarding packed food products so you’ll have to dig around.

As for packaging, use Recipal for the nutritional info.

Track your costs down to the penny so you know what it actually costs to make per bottle.

Hard part of starting in the farmers market is the trap of when you want to go bigger.

Say you make your sauce bottle for $2.50 and sell them for $5 - 50% gross margin! Great? Nope. Because when Central Market comes along, they will also want to sell it for $5, which means they’ll want to buy it for like $2.50-3, which means the distributor will want to buy it for $2.50 or less. Which means by that time you should be making it for like $1.

Don’t let that scare you, but worth considering. Good luck

 

[dbirdez]

@codegreen Awesome insights. Thank you

 

[krill]

@dbirdez You could try marketing to local Chinese/Asian food restaurants.

 

[iazlover]

@dbirdez I don’t know the laws of your area, but you can’t serve food to the public without it coming from a commercial kitchen. So I would say if you want to make a batch for the farmers market is to first find a commissary kitchen to work out of, and talk to the health department about the local laws.

 

[dbirdez]

@iazlover I’ll just put a disclaimer at the booth

 

[fibble]

@dbirdez Disclaimer ain't gonna fly

 

[dbirdez]

lol was just a joke on the disclaimer

 

[nolongerdivided]

@dbirdez That is not how the world works my guy.