First customers in packaged food
The first-ten method starts at a farmers market table, run as research paid for in cash. Applications go in months ahead, booth fees run 20 to 50 dollars a day, bring at most three products, and sample deliberately: every spoken objection ("too spicy," "ten dollars?") gets written down that night and becomes a packaging, product, or price fix. Capture emails on a clipboard, not a QR code; the list carries your winter. At week six or eight, with repeat faces visible, walk into independent stores on a weekday morning. The pitch script:
"Hi, I'm [name], I make [product] here in [town]. We've been selling it at the [market name] for [n] weeks and people keep asking where to buy it between Saturdays. Can I leave you a jar and a sheet with the wholesale price and our terms? I deliver and stock it myself, invoiced net thirty, and it comes with our liability certificate."
First accounts are a case or two, self-delivered and self-restocked, with your insurance certificate on file and a lot code on every unit.
Pricing in packaged food
The pricing method inverts here: price from the shelf backward, because everyone between you and the shelf takes a contractual share. Margin is not markup; a store taking a 40 percent margin on a 10-dollar jar pays you 6. The operator-reported channel table: your booth keeps 90-plus percent of retail, direct independent stores leave you 60 to 70, chains through a distributor about 40 to 45, and club stores look like a gift at roughly 86 percent until the pallet-scale terms arrive. The working target: landed COGS at or under a quarter of retail, so 1.30 dollars of cost supports a 10-dollar jar. Budget trade spend at 15 to 20 percent of gross wholesale for discounts, demos, and chargebacks, with slotting fees industry-estimated at 250 to 1,000 dollars per item per store.
Rules in packaged food
The setup method meets a regulator who inspects before your first customer does. The kitchen question has three levels, cottage home kitchen, licensed shared kitchen (15 to 45 dollars an hour), or co-packer, and you ask both your state's health and agriculture departments which one licenses you. Federal layer: FDA facility registration is free and renews in even years, and acidified or low-acid canned foods require a process authority and Better Process Control School under 21 CFR 114 and 113. The USDA line is a cliff: meat, poultry, and eggs mean federal inspectors on-site. Labels carry five mandatory elements, and two small-business nutrition exemptions cover a first-year brand until any nutrient claim voids them. Buy the real GS1 barcode at 30 dollars, never a reseller code, and lot-code every batch.
Money in packaged food
The money system in a product business is the cash conversion cycle: you pay for ingredients, packaging, and kitchen time now, then wait for the market Saturday, the store's thirty-day terms, or the distributor's forty-five. The lean entry, 2,700 to 4,700 dollars, fits the one-to-five-thousand band with almost no buffer. Reinvest by rule, a fixed percentage of every market and store dollar back into inventory, and treat market season as your highest-margin cash period. One operator's public arc, operator-reported and unverified, ran 7 thousand to 40 to 80 to 144 thousand across four years. Online, own the site (Shopify at 29 to 30 a month plus 2.9 percent and 30 cents) and rent the marketplace (Amazon's grocery referral runs 8 to 15 percent).
First hire in packaged food
The course's scale move is not payroll; it is the production ladder from shared kitchen to co-packer, with operator-reported minimums from 50 to 500 cases regionally up to 10,000 pounds at large plants, triggered when producing hours exceed selling hours. For an actual first employee, the first-hire method owns the decision.
The scripts, channel table, and 90-day plan live in the full course.