Meal kit delivery business 10 steps to Start small business
If you were looking to create a meal kit delivery business, I'm going to give you 10 steps, solid steps to get you up and running with your meal kit delivery business right now.
All right. So welcome back. This is marketing you food online, and I'm going to give you guys 10 steps to get a meal kit delivery business started. And I'm going to also give you some information about how to get it running efficiently, quickly, and online, and we're going to get to it right now. So number one, the first and foremost, most important thing about any business, whether or not your state requires this many States do not. If you're happy to be starting from home, uh, to incorporate yourself, okay, you need to incorporate yourself as a business. Do not do this as a hobby on the side. When you're preparing foods, if you happen to be doing it so far and handing it to friends and giving it out to family and friends, that's one thing, okay, when you get into a business realm, the business world, and you start doing this as a full time business, you carry it on a lot of liability in order for you to kind of divert that liability from your personal assets, from your house, your car and everything you own, you need to separate yourself as a business entity.
You need to do that. Okay? I prefer most of the time I recommend to a lot of the clients I do. My consulting is LLCs work perfectly fine when you start, okay, that's going to limit the amount of liability you're going to take on, and it's going to protect any of your personal assets. So if anything were to happen, somebody gets sick or an allergic reaction or something like that. When it comes to food, which potentially could happen. Um, the liability is really going to be transitioned over to your business and not yourself. So number one, incorporate number two second. Wave of protection. I guess you could say is that you want to make sure you get some type of food, producers, insurance. Okay. So I'm going to give you after just really quick, by the way, I'm going to give you these 10 and down in the description below this video, check out in the description.
I'll give you links to two a, you can actually create a LLC online, get yourself some insurance and any of the other things that I give you right here, I'm gonna give you some additional resources down below. Okay. So number two, insurance. Why do I need insurance? Damien? Well, here's the thing. The LLC will protect you. Insurance for your food production is going to give you an, even more of a protection. Okay? If it happens to have that, you've got to pay out of some kind. If you go through litigation and God forbid this happens, somebody gets sick and you've got to pay off your insurance policy is for that purpose. And it's for your business, not you, your business. So food producers, insurance is number two, number three. All right. So you want to create a meal kit delivery business. Now, the next question is, what are you going to make?
You need to create a recipe or a line of dinners or lunches, or to go items, whatever it is that you're looking to make, write it down and figure out what's your focus. And here's what I mean, are you going to do gluten-free? Are you going to do a low carb, maybe low sugar, or you can do some type of diabetic meals. What specifically is going to be your niche of food delivery meal kits? Okay. Now a lot of times, some people go out and they create this enormous menu of stuff, but they don't really have a focus as to specifically kind of honing in on one particular type of food, a lunch or dinner or a meal. So you want to make sure you kind of are focused on one thing, because that's going to be a big part of your marketing campaign when you start to promote a market.
This. So for instance, as an example, if you did a diabetic type of foods that are very low in sugar, they're are very friendly to diabetic, uh, of, uh, recipes. You want to make sure that you're focused on that because as you begin to promote it, let's say on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, you can hone in on that specific group of people who need or are looking for those types of meal kits. Okay. So number three is write it down, spell it out, figure out exactly what it is you want to hone in on and you want to perfect. Okay. Number four, how are you wanting to ship these meals? And here's what I mean. There is a huge variety of, of, uh, companies out there that are offering all kinds of meal kits. Some of them ship frozen, some of them ship fresh foods.
Okay. Now it's very important to figure out which one's gonna work best for your product. If you're looking for quality and that type of, uh, of, of qualities when it comes to the product that they're going to get. And here's what I mean by that. If you start to ship fresh foods, you're going to end up having to use potentially you're gonna have to use either some ice packs or dry ice, even to keep the temperature of those products. Uh, during transit, they're going to have to arrive in a way that's not going to be spoiled. It's not going to be hindered by temperatures. Um, and a lot of times, a lot of companies end up going the frozen route because they'll make the meal kit, freeze it and then ship it overnight or do a two day delivery with other dry ice or ice packs.
Um, and frozen seems to be the most popular one because in transit, if it happens to fluctuate for the temperature inside of the box, you need to keep that in mind, frozen meals will blast much better than it would be if it was fresh, because there's a really small, fine line of freshness when it comes to temperature and you have to maintain that. So keep that in mind, figure out how you want to ship it. I personally would recommend to you do your meal kits, frozen, nothing wrong with that. Number five, the size of your shipping box. So now you figured out what you're going to make. You got to figure out how you're going to ship it, but how are you going to, how are you going to ship it to your customers next up? How are you going to box it? What's going to make sense.
How big, how small, what shape of a box is going to work well, are you going to get an insulated box for shipping or are you simply just going to use some ice packs and a standard shipping carton? That is what you have to figure out and it's, I would recommend too. This is something we did, uh, not necessarily. We don't have a meal kits, but when we started shipping cookies and baked goods, we would ship. So we experimented and we shipped some of those to ourselves. Okay. And I would see that it would either show up melted if it's chocolate pretzels, for instance, if it was melted that I need to go higher up on the ice packs. If it was damaged, I need to figure out how to ship, ship it a little safer to prevent it from breaking. So do some experimenting and shipping it to yourself.
So number five is, figure out what size should be box. You need. Number six, you need to figure out where is it a commercial kitchen that I could do this close to me. Can you do this from home? Potentially? You could, uh, under cottage food laws, you're really not allowed to do that. As far as, uh, prepared meals, it's considered potentially hazardous. So the idea of making meals from home and shipping them is not going to work. Technically it's not legal. Okay? But commercial kitchens, if you rent it out a commercial kitchen, you can prepare the meals that you've accumulated as far as your orders. And then I'm going to get into that in a minute. I'm gonna explain to you how that works too. So you can get those and accumulate them and then ship them and make them from your commercial kitchen. And you're done.
So you're not transporting anything home. Nothing is being made at home. It's all being done in a licensed facility. And you're good to go. Number seven, are you going to deliver local or online? So you've got your commercial kitchen, right? So you've prepared your meals. You're set to go. Yeah. Are you, are you getting an accumulating, these orders locally, just from word of mouth to start. That's a good way to do it. To be honest with you. Are you going to do it online? Okay. So if you're gonna do it online, the challenge there is trying to get traffic to your website, getting people to know about your meal kit. Every business online is a huge challenge. So I would recommend start locally and let people spread the word, tell them to spread the word, tell them to tell their friends or family, anyone about it.
And that way you could come, you could create the product in your commercial kitchen, take them and deliver them locally. And you're good to go. Now, of course, make sure that you've got the right licensing, permits and such to do this, um, in regards to preparing and delivering. Okay, because I say this because cities and counties, not only States, cities and counties will have different types of permits and licensing requirements for meal, kit, delivery businesses. Okay. And that's a simple thing. You just go down to your business development office in your city, tell them you have to apply for your business license. Obviously tell them what you're making, what you're doing and they'll classify you accordingly. Okay. So number eight, pick a day. If this is going to be a monthly, however, you're setting this up. If it's biweekly or monthly, pick a specific day that you're going to rent the commercial kitchen.
And within that time frame that you're renting the commercial kitchen. You need to make sure your preparing all of the meals that you need to get. Here's what I mean, most commercial kitchens either will rent hourly or by blocks of hours.
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