How to Start a Home Based Catering Business: A Step-By-Step Guide

If you enjoy cooking and wishing to own a business, you can turn your passion for cooking into profits by starting a home based catering business.

While there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful home catering service business, a dash of culinary skills, determination, and grace under fire can go a long way. Catering businesses can be run from home full or part-time.

For many food-lovers, the ultimate dream is to open up their own food business. What many people don’t realize in the beginning is that starting a home based food business there’s a lot of business operational skills that are necessary to get started and be successful. This step-by-step guide will walk you through how to start a food business and what you should consider when starting one.

The Step by Step Guide to Start a Home Based Catering Business

If you're ready to start cooking, here are the steps to starting your home based catering business.

Step 1: Self-Assessment

Passion can get you a long way, but when it comes to how to start a food business you’re also going to need hard work and business smarts. While much of how to start a small food business consists of concrete steps such as choosing your business structure and finding funding, there’s also the soul-searching question: Are you willing and capable to do this?

Before you start, take a moment to write down your strengths, consider your support network, and brainstorm your resources—better yet, research what resources are available to you.

Step 2: Write a Detailed Business Plan

A business plan is basically a road map for success. You start where you are, determine where you want to go, and then fill in the tasks that need to be done to get there. A business plan can also be beneficial if you’re looking for funding to start your food business.

It can seem intimidating to make one, but if you’re researching how to start a food business, it’s likely that you already have a lot of great thoughts to contribute to your plan.

Here’s how to create a simple, short plan for your home business.

1. Provide an Overview of Your Business

Your business plan should provide an overview of your business, including the following information:

• What Do You Offer?
• What Is Special or Different About What You Offer?
• How Will Your Product or Service Help People?
• Who Will Benefit From What You Offer?

Note: People buy solutions, so always think about selling your product and services in terms of how it will solve your market's problems.

   

 2. Create a Business Budget

One of the most important parts of your business plan, especially if you’re seeking funding, is the business budget.

A business budget will include looking at all the costs you’ll need to cover to begin operation of your business, what funds you’ll need to operate the business once it’s up and running, and a more long-term look at how your business will make money and how much money you expect to make.

A few examples of the costs you’ll incur and what you need to consider while starting a food business include:

• What type of food business you’re starting?
• Cost of employees and management team if necessary
• Equipment
• Initial investment in food product

3. Research Your Competitors

As you’re putting together your business plan, you need to start looking at and assessing your competitors. The food industry is very competitive and many markets are saturated. Before you go any further in starting your small food business, you need to know who else is out there and what they’re doing.

As you’re finding your competitors, make sure to be assessing what they do well and where they’re lacking. That will tell you where there’s a hole that you can fill with your business.

This is also a great time to be looking at prices and assessing the cost of doing business and the reality of how much money you’ll be able to make.

4. Find a Niche Market

 The ideal situation for starting a food business is to find a hole in the market. Where is there customer desire that no one else is filling? And just because no one is doing it, doesn’t mean there’s customer desire—to turn a profit, customers have to want it and be willing to buy it.

Finding a hole in the market will help you to decide what kind of food you want to sell and how you want to sell it. There are a variety of options to choose from when it comes to how to sell your food including:

• Meal delivery (nowadays there are so many food deliveries service you can contract to deliver you food products to customers at no extra cost to your business e.g Jumia food. Opay food e.t.c)
• Baked goods sold to other food establishments
• In-home food business
• Food truck-Mobile restaurant
• Wedding and special event catering 

5. Choose a Concept

When starting a food business, it’s important to decide what type of food business you want to have. The main options include: a brick-and-mortar restaurant, a food truck, and a home-based catering business. Home-based catering business tend to require less capital to get started than a full-fledged brick and mortar restaurant.

6. How Will Money Be Made

• How Much Will You Charge for Your Product or Service?
• How Will You Be Paid? -Offering more than one payment option increases the chances you'll be able to make a sale.
• When Will You Be Paid? - If you’re selling a product, you’ll be paid at the time of the sale, but if you’re selling a service, you might not get paid until it is completed or delivered. Or you can charge half the cost upfront and bill the remaining when the service is provided.

7. Getting Clients and Customers

• Who Is Your Ideal Customer?
• Where Can Your Ideal Customer Be Found?
• How Can You Entice Your Ideal Customer?

8. Assessing Your Start Up Needs

• What Are Your Assets to Get Started?
• How Much Do You Need to Get Started and Where Are You Going to Get It?
• How Much Do You Want to Make?
• What Do You Need to Do to Reach Your Financial Goal?

9. Overcoming Obstacles

• What’s Stopping You?
• How Can You Overcome What’s Stopping You?

 Each of these questions requires just a few words or sentences to help you focus and build a foundation for a successful business. This exercise will guide you to defining what you’ve got and who you’ve got it for, the numbers you need to achieve to reach your financial goal, and areas you need to deal with or overcome.

Step 3: Set Up Your Business

Once you’ve studied your market, you know where there’s a hole that needs to be filled, and you’ve taken some time to create a business plan, you’re ready to take the first steps toward starting your food business.

•  Choose a Business Entity
• Register Your Business
• Separate Your Finances

Step 4: Invest in Product and Tools

When it comes to how to start a food business, you need more than just cash and business entity to make your dream a reality: You need equipment, food supplies, and packaging materials-branding.

Step 5: Create an Online Presence

While you might think that a food business is all about food—and it is—you also need to get customers in the door and eating your food. The food industry is notoriously difficult to break into. For example, 85% of consumer packaged goods products fail within the first two years. One important step to avoiding that fate is establishing your online presence and nurturing your consumer base.

 1. Social Media

While food is all about the taste, many diners shop with their eyes. If you want to establish an online presence for your food business, one of the fastest ways to do that is through social media.

Instagram is a food business’s best friend. Post delicious-looking pictures of your food and customers will want to try it. Make sure you interact with consumers and encourage them to see you as a company that will be responsive to their needs.

2. Website

While not every food business has a website, this can be a way to establish your credibility as a business. A website can be a place to post information for customers including menus, restaurant hours, and specials. There are a number of ways to build your small food business website, so it’s easier than ever to either sell products online or add helpful features like reservation widgets to your site.

Step 6: Serve Up Delicious Foods

When you’re thinking about how to start a small food business, the big draw is, obviously, the food. What you’ll cook, how it will taste to the diners, and what seasonal changes you’ll make to the menu. Owning a food business is only partly about the food, though—there’s also a ton of time spent on operating and managing the business.

For authentic tasty Nigerian recipes get any of our cookbooks. Click any image to gain access to it.