Making a food product/ getting into stores

Lady lou

Hi folks,
I have some great ideas of making my own food products. My job at the minute entails distributing other people's products but I feel there is a gap in the market and I could make it myself. This would be a add on to my already successful start up business.

Problem is I have no experience of making a product.
It basically entails getting two - three ingredients from different company's and putting it together to make my own product.
Firstly:
Is this allowed? Like I'm not growing it myself I'm buying it in.
Also
Say one Ingreidents is ice-cream? Which I will buy from a company?! Is it ok for me to use this and claim to be mine as long as it's in my product?!
Secondly
Is it ok to make this my kitchen at the start?
Lastly:
Is there a simple system of bottling and sealing that anyone could fill me in on? Thanks.

PhoenixParker

Look up the Dublin Food Chain. They have dozens of seminars on stuff like this.

duploelabs

Lady lou wrote: »

Hi folks,
I have some great ideas of making my own food products. My job at the minute entails distributing other people's products but I feel there is a gap in the market and I could make it myself. This would be a add on to my already successful start up business.

Problem is I have no experience of making a product.
It basically entails getting two - three ingredients from different company's and putting it together to make my own product.
Firstly:
Is this allowed? Like I'm not growing it myself I'm buying it in.
Also
Say one Ingreidents is ice-cream? Which I will buy from a company?! Is it ok for me to use this and claim to be mine as long as it's in my product?!
Secondly
Is it ok to make this my kitchen at the start?
Lastly:
Is there a simple system of bottling and sealing that anyone could fill me in on? Thanks.

Jesus, there's so many holes to pick there that I'm going to start sounding like some of the more regular posters on this board

1. No experience in production??? Hire someone who does, or go and work for somewhere to gain the experience yourself.
2. Of course you can but in another product, but your margins will be hammered, especially if it's not priced as a food service item with associated margins.
3. Depending on your ingredient list will dictate what your EHO requires you to have. For example to create a meat-based product if it's a foodservice (think it as a B2B option) with raw meat means that your production kitchen will fall under the same guidelines as a slaughterhouse, no matter what size of production you're doing. It's just the way the system runs. Yes you can, under certain circumstances, run a start up from your home kitchen, but your EHO will dictate this (and virtually everything else you do)
4. Depending on your product, there are many packaging solutions.

I could teach a 6 month full-time course on what you have done, but I would start with point 1 and work from there.

WesternJohn

Very interesting I have always wanted to work in food.
I was living in Portugal for a while and was good friends with someone in one of the big food chains out there, there version of Dunnes I guess,

I always wanted to bring Portuguese products to Ireland and bring Irish foods to Portugal,
Is there much of a need for Irish food companies to have a company or person to get their products into food stores abroad?

duploelabs

WesternJohn wrote: »

Very interesting I have always wanted to work in food.
I was living in Portugal for a while and was good friends with someone in one of the big food chains out there, there version of Dunnes I guess,

I always wanted to bring Portuguese products to Ireland and bring Irish foods to Portugal,
Is there much of a need for Irish food companies to have a company or person to get their products into food stores abroad?

If you're talking 'a man from del monte' then they already have a lot of them. As for importation of produce from Portugal or Spain then good luck to you. The shipping costs are ridiculous, easily 7 or 8 times the price of the produce itself