New England Specialty Foods
Non-Profit Marketing, Cost Reduction & Information Services for Small Producers
A Central Production Facility for All of New England
If you've been looking for the perfect production facility to produce your products and haven't found one yet, you shouldn't be surprised. This is par for the course in most cases. The options are minimal.
To start with, you must realize that in order to make a profit, you must be able to produce your products in a sizeable volume. This means enough to pay for all of your costs, including your time, and enough left over for a profit. For example, if you work 50 hours a week, what is your time worth? If your goal is $20 per hour, that means you must have $1,000 in profits to pay yourself, after you pay all your expenses. A pretty sobering thought, huh? If you're like most people, you will think that it's OK to work for free at first, and you'll pay yourself later. Unfortunately, later seldom happens. This explains why a sizeable volume is so important. Just to pay your self a reasonable salary each week, you must sell a large volume of your products, profitably.
At present, the options for a production facility include: a handful of community kitchens around New England, a few dozen copackers, few of whom can produce large enough volumes, finding a production space in a restaurant, etc., which you can rent, or outfitting your own facility. Obviously, the final option is the most desirable, because this is the only one where you control your own fate. The down side of this, is that in most cases, this just isn't affordable.
This brings us to another one of our future goals, a huge production facility in Worcester, Massachusetts (New England's geographical center), with multiple capabilities for producing large volumes of most types of 'specialty food products'. How would this be accomplished? Some possibilities are assistance from the state or federal government, since this would create lots of new jobs, both at the facility as well as more employees for growing producers; A large sponsor; a hundred small producers each paying 1% of the cost, or a combination of all of the above.
If you'd like to be added to a brainstorming session for this, just send us a quick email at info@newenglandsspecialtyfoods.com.
