The food industry is growing at a considerable rate. Demand for good quality food is ever increasing. In a busy schedule life with jobs and other priorities, cooking has become a burden and people are drawn towards food delivery services for their everyday needs. The healthier the food, the better chances for everyday sales. This opens a space for homemade fresh food to be sold online.
This article provides the steps to help you start a homemade food delivery business online.
The ultimate guide to starting a home food delivery business.
1. Find out your cuisine, style, and audience
To sell quality food online, you need to recognize your strengths and what you’re good at.
Once you’ve decided on that, get your food recipes tested by friends and family. Every bit of feedback will be helpful for you to ace at what you do.
Choose a style or cuisine or focus on a target market. Like, packed meals for office employees, evenings homemade delicacies for students, cake business, or full course menu for families. And curate your menu and meal plan that people would eat heartily.
2. Set your workspace
Every other piece of equipment to establish a homemade food delivery business will be more or less found in your home. So, try to minimize spending in purchasing utensils and unwanted equipment. The most necessary ones would be:-
- Big utensils to prepare food in large batches
- Food containers to store excess food
- And most importantly plastic or cardboard meal packages or containers for delivery.
Do make sure your workspace and food pass the state food hygiene and cleanliness requirements.
3. Hire Reliable Staff
Making delicious food alone won’t run your business unless it reaches hungry people. Online food businesses can’t sustain themselves without delivery services. To solve this, you need to hire responsible and trustworthy delivery people who can be reliable and deliver your food with care to your customers. It would be preferable if they have a vehicle of their own or if you have enough funds you can invest in a delivery vehicle.
There are also other options today to get delivery services by partnering with food delivery agents like Wefast who’ll manage delivery and payment.
You may also hire staff for food preparation and maintenance based on your need.
4. Develop a business plan
It is essential to have a concrete plan to effectively run a home business. And for a food delivery business, your business plan needs to address the following:
- Grocery list for every week, and maintaining a budget for each item.
- Preparation costs include labour, gas, electricity, and water.
- Staff or delivery personnel salary.
- Cost of food items and quantity.
With every order and expense incurred, maintain a proper cash flow of your online business.
These finance strategies need to be analyzed and improved over time with experience.
5. Obtain licenses
One of the most essential steps is to obtain all relevant licenses and permits to start your homemade food delivery business with ease. This includes:
- Fssai license from the food and health department in India.
- Trade license
- Shop and Establishment Act license
- Society’s NOC
Maintaining essential permits and licenses will help your business earn customer trust and build loyalty. All these are necessary and without them, your business may be in legal trouble in the future.
For more information on license and its procedures check out this article from fssai or contact the Municipal corporation in your city.
6. Design your brand
For a business to have long-term success, it needs to have a strong brand identity. Some steps to follow are:
- Name your business
- Identify your vision and values.
- Choose your theme or colours
- Design your menu
- Apply branding wherever necessary like packaging, posters, boards, staff wear, etc.
Branding not only includes your business’s visual identity but also your customer’s perception of it. Branding builds customer trust, loyalty, and recognition for your business.
7. Create a marketing strategy
Every business needs marketing to sustain itself. And once you’ve decided on your target audience,
promoting and selling your brand should be done to build customer engagement and interest. This can be done by:
- Endorsing through friends and family.
- Hand out samples of your food at local events and fairs.
- Distributing flyers and posters across neighbourhoods and with newspapers.
- Social media marketing by maintaining updates and posting pictures of your recipes and dishes on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
An online food business takes time to flourish and get customers. No one will know about it just by listing it on the Internet. Maintaining an active presence online and proper marketing goes a long way in promoting your brand and will help your business reach heights.
8. Build a website or mobile application to boost your digital presence.
To grow your business from home and increase its customer reach, you’ll need to maintain an attractive website with your menu listed for users to easily browse and make their orders in a few clicks.
Also, today when everything is at your fingertips, it would be dreadful to stick to traditional techniques like calls for confirming orders.
With a feature-rich website and mobile application that can handle showcasing menu, collecting orders, and confirming payment within minutes, your food delivery business is bound to succeed. You’ll be able to expand your customer base and manage several orders and payments in the blink of an eye.
One such platform that can help with getting your business online is TakeMyOrder. TakeMyOrder offers you a website and a mobile application with all the required features relevant to take any business online that too in just 30 minutes.
Also, do look at this guide here for more ways to boost your digital presence.
A homemade food delivery business is a great way for those who love cooking, baking as a hobby and would like to start a business from home. It would help them earn from home and also provide food to people during lockdown when restaurants are closed due to the covid-19 pandemic. And with the demand for healthy and delicious food, there is still scope for homemade food delivery businesses.
