So You Wanna : Start a Food or Beverage Business

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.

Douglas Raggio is experienced in nearly every aspect of the $150 billion specialty food industry. He is the founder of a thriving food company, Pass the Honey. He also founded the slow-cooked meal company, Stews & Such, cultivating a network of manufacturers, vendors, distributors, co-packers and retailers in/around the packaged food space.

 

Concurrently, he was the founder and managing director of early-stage venture capital fund Gastronome Ventures, one of the first fully-dedicated VCs in the healthier-for-you-food/beverage industry. He is founder of private equity fund Bias & Blinds Spots, also focused on emerging healthy food and beverage branded companies, with transactions currently totaling more than $150M.

 

He’s been an advisor to more than a hundred startups and is a sought-after speaker at North America’s largest specialty food trade shows. His tenure in the space has given him the opportunity to vet 12,000+ investment opportunities spanning more than a decade, including companies going from zero to multi-millions and those going in reverse to bankruptcy.

 

Previous to his work in the food and beverage industry, he managed $100M+ marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 companies including Nike, Motorola, DirecTV, and Discovery Channel. Douglas received a BS in Organizational Communication from Cal Poly Pomona.