There is a disconnect between early stage entrepreneurs’ perceptions of available money for their venture and the sheer volume of individuals and funds looking to invest in the space at various stages, if you know where to look. Most entrepreneurs start out with “friends and family” funding (essentially people they know who will take a risk wit ...…

RP’s Pasta is now part of the portfolio of brands of Tribe 9 Foods. One of founder Peter Robertson's first challenges was category placement as a fresh, refrigerated pasta. RP’s started moving with the consumer to come up with flavors that were non-traditional in Northern Italy, including unique flavors and ingredients. A trip to Expo West in 2 ...…

Willy Street Co-op is a set of cooperatively owned retail grocery stores in Madison, WI. Founded in 1974, they now have 35,000 member-owners and about 400 employees across three stores. This last fiscal year, the co-op generated about $52 million in sales, making them one of the largest grocery co-ops in the country. The grocery market has chan ...…

Dorchester’s Farm Food Hub, a for-profit cooperative located in Prince County, Maryland serving the Chesapeake Bay food shed. The Hub aggregates and tries to ensure consistent supply of seafood and farm products (fruit, produce, livestock) and then redistributes to areas that are historically under-served via direct delivery of fresh and health ...…

Funky Fresh Spring Rolls is a company that produces uniquely flavored, hand rolled spring rolls that are baked or grilled (not fried) with fresh and local ingredients. Originally, the founder had wanted Funky Fresh to go directly to grocery store retail in part to avoid the all-consuming nature of owning a restaurant. But, grocery stores have c ...…

ReGrained is a national brand of bars and ready-to-eat snacks made from the high-protein and high-fiber flour of “spent” grains used in the beer brewing process. Their core bar product went through many iterations before being ready to scale, and since the bar category is crowded and competitive, it was a learning process to get trial and educa ...…

The Amazon platform provides a means for small and emerging brands to find an audience and generate sales if they dedicate time and resources to ensure discoverability on the platform by constantly optimizing product pages with the right keywords and features once the user is on the page, in addition to paying for keyword-based advertising. Man ...…

Ephrata National Bank in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is a $1 billion community bank with 25% of their portfolio funding agricultural entrepreneurs. The bank’s staff have found that changing the price the farmers receive via new business models or premium offerings through things like organic production or value-added processing helps farmers ...…

Brix Cider is a hard cider company in southern Wisconsin with about 1,000 trees, many of which were hand-grafted from local cultivated and wild apple varieties. After initially home brewing for many years, the hard cider company eventually connected with a local winery that had extra production capacity and began producing in small batches and ...…

The Great Basin Community Food Co-op serves the Reno, Nevada area. The co-op started as a private buying club and was initially located in the back of a punk record store, but continued to grow their sales and members. In 2008, they opened to the public in downtown Reno with 500 feet of retail space, eventually hitting $1 million in sales in on ...…

The Old Fort at Hesperus' team sees farming education as a continuum where different people are best served by discreet programs, depending on their interests and stage of development. Their sustainable agriculture program includes an educational garden internship, a farmer-in-training program, and market garden incubator. The incubator program ...…

Tribe 9 Foods is the result of merging Yumbutter, RP’s Pasta and Ona Treats. The new company also secured growth capital to bring manufacturing in-house for all three brands, something that has allowed them to have control over batch timing, batch size and product quality. In addition, in-house production allows them the flexibility to try new ...…

TRIBALÍ foods is a national brand of freshly made, frozen grass-fed and grass-finished beef patties. TRIBALÍ’s products resonate with the “tribe” of people who are looking for convenient, easy ways to eat whole, nutrient dense and ethically raised foods. Their clean, simple packaging that communicates their organic, grass-fed and Paleo certific ...…

Union Kitchen is a shared-use kitchen and food business accelerator in in Washington D.C. While having a shared-use kitchen eliminates the need for capital for kitchen equipment, there are many other things food businesses need to raise capital for, which why they have distribution and retail outlets as part of their model. Their vertically int ...…

James D. Gage Consulting is a firm that helps value-added farms and other agriculture clients problem solve in critical business areas so that they can be financially viable. Jim's firm works as a value-added business strategist and creates a client-consultant relationship with entrepreneurs before writing a Value-Added Producer Grant (VAPG) fo ...…

Rufus Haucke is the owner of Keewaydin Farms, a 200-acre diversified organic vegetable farm that also works aggregating local farmer's produce in a distribution business. The business’ sales peaked in 2012 at over $800,000 with Rufus coordinating production from over 100 different producers (including his own farm) throughout the season. Howeve ...…

Shari Leidich, founder of Know Brainer, started down the path of being a serial entrepreneur when she found out she had Multiple Sclerosis (MS). She turned her love for healthy, sprouted raw whole foods that helped mitigate her MS into products under the brand Two Moms in the Raw (now Soul Sprout). Shortly after she left Two Moms in 2016, she b ...…

Eric White is a Principal at Cogent Consulting, a firm which helps social entrepreneurs and revenue-generating nonprofits raise social impact investments. Cogent also works with social impact investors to source investment opportunities and helps them build their portfolio strategy, including the incorporation of tools like Program Related Inve ...…

Patrick Mateer is the Founder and CEO of Seal The Seasons, a brand of produce frozen on a state-by-state or region-by-region basis that is then distributed to those same communities’ grocery stores. They began production in one of the partitions of a shared-use commissary kitchen facility where they installed an Individually Quick Frozen (IQF) ...…

Mary Pellettieri is the co-founder of Top Note Tonics, a company that makes complex and layered American craft mixers. Mary’s experience in sales, marketing, distribution and new product development/research and quality assurance, including at Goose Island and Miller/Coors, has allowed her to take calculated risks. Top Note has pivoted away fro ...…

MobCraft beer is a brewery and taproom with a unique business model of crowdsourcing ideas for beer recipes from their customers. Their brewery/taproom in Milwaukee cost just over $2 million to build. When MobCraft first started to raise money to finance their facility, they looked for institutional capital at first without much success and the ...…

Dave Lohrentz is co-owner of Madison Sourdough, a bakery, café, patisserie and mill in Madison, WI specializing in sourdough breads. They have grown using a vertically integrated business model by adding a restaurant that highlights their baked goods and bakery. They have also added an artisanal grain mill to their production processes, sourcin ...…

Jonny Hunter, one of the founders of the Underground Food Collective, talks about the Collective’s growing as a series of horizontally integrated businesses. Their business model works because of infrastructure like a centralized production facility behind them to support their interrelated retail and manufacturing/processing businesses in an e ...…

Matt and Clare Stoner Fehsenfeld are the married duo behind Quince and Apple, a national brand of small-batch, well-balanced preserves that are often paired with cheese and charcuterie. When they started their business, they realized that because they have a labor-intensive, artisanal product, their best strategy was not to compete on quantity ...…

Love The Wild CEO Jacqueline Claudia managed a fish farm before launching Love the Wild with co-founder Christy Brouker in 2014 to fill the gap in the market for convenient, delicious and environmentally friendly, freshly frozen seafood. The knowledgeable food entrepreneur community in Boulder helped Jacqueline understand the realistic path to ...…

Dan Lemmer of the Wisconsin SBDC’s capital access team talks about how there is value in having a process for financial management and fine-tuning it as you learn more about your business. For example, if you project your needed cash or total sales based on a specific set of assumptions and track it accordingly, you can see how accurate you wer ...…

Dan Lemmer of the Wisconsin SBDC’s capital access team talks about building great financial systems and realistic projections for food, beverage and value-added agriculture businesses. From the entrepreneur’s perspective, the most important thing when using an accounting package is to ensure accurate setup and data entry so that they are able t ...…

Sara Parthasarathy and Partha Sabniviss, the married couple behind Flavor Temptations, an organic Indian recipe pack brand which includes a traditional Indian recipe with the exact amounts of fresh, organic spices needed to cook the recipe. Originally branded as Ethnic Spicery, they changed their brand name to Flavor Temptations to fully commun ...…

The USDA’s programs serve not just agricultural producers but also rural businesses and rural people more broadly since farmers need strong small-town economies, institutions and infrastructure. This includes programs meant to incentivize and leverage private dollars for investment in rural areas. However, there is a big need to educate investo ...…

Biological farming is treating your farm like an ecosystem and preserving the long-term health of the soil. Midwestern BioAg is a company that provides farmers with consulting and products (mostly inputs) that help their farm’s yields, resiliency and profitability by using biological farming methods i.e. treating your farm like an ecosystem and ...…

Big food and beverage companies start the new product development process by focusing on their target consumer and the value proposition they are offering that consumer through their brand promise. Discovering and defining a consumer driven product is much harder to do than making a food product. For big food companies, the new product developm ...…

FEED Kitchens is a shared-use kitchen that also serves as a business incubator for food businesses like small-batch bakers, sauce makers, caterers and food carts. Started with $1.4 million of initial investment, their current location includes 5,400 square feet and 3 and 1/2 full time equivalent employees. Their kitchen is in use on average abo ...…

Zero Waste Facility Certification can improve food businesses’ bottom lines while helping them meet existing standards for building design, construction and operations. LEED and Zero Waste Facility Certification also give them a framework to exceed standards where it makes business sense. For example, when Tera Johnson (the Edible-Alpha® podcas ...…

Company valuations should be done based on a rational justification of the future growth rate and future earnings of the company, as well as the fundamentals of the business model. For example, whether the company is defensibly unique and how long its competitive advantage can be sustained are both key drivers of a company’s value.…

An SBA 504 loan is a special product that can only be offered by a Certified Development Company (CDC) like WBD in partnership with a local lender. The 504 loan is designed to help small businesses grow and create jobs by financing fixed assets like real estate and equipment. Qualified borrowers receive long terms (20 years for real estate, 10 ...…

This Hub realized it needed to reach at least $3.3 million in sales to break even, and the Hub broke even on a net income basis in 2016 despite the poor prices for produce. To maintain their margins, they built the Hub’s capacity through adequate staffing while also only spending on essentials and taking advantage of their uniquely cheap wareho ...…

The Farm Credit system consists of a farmer owned, farmer led co-ops which primarily lend to farmers and any agriculture producers anywhere in all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, including manufacturing companies if majority owned by farmers. The book Fearless Farm Finances is a a farmer-friendly reference guide for all things financial relatin ...…

Bartlett Durand of Conscious Carnivore, a whole animal butcher shop in Madison, WI talks about how Black Earth Meats (Black Earth, Wisconsin) evolved into Conscious Carnivore. The craft of cutting meat takes a long time to learn, and because Black Earth Meats operated at a human scale that honored the humans and the animals, his employees and a ...…

Bartlett Durand worked with his father-in-law Gary Zimmer on Otter Creek farm, working with a local cheese maker to make a delicious, truly seasonal cheddar cheese. Bartlett saw huge demand for local/organic meats in his work with Otter Creek. However, there wasn’t consistent throughput and quality to properly serve consumers and restaurants. R ...…

Leanne Cordisco of the Chocolaterian Café talks about her path as an entrepreneur and what led her to her current food business model. She started out making a toffee with Belgian chocolate, French sea salt, and Wisconsin cream for wholesale via a local distributor. She realized that she was on a path to becoming a national brand, but didn’t wa ...…

Like all credit unions, Summit is a cooperative which exists to serve their members. Summit is based in south-central and southeast Wisconsin and is the #1 Small Business Administration (SBA) lender in Wisconsin among credit unions for the past 6 years. Summit helps food entrepreneurs access SBA 7a programs to provide up to $5 million of capita ...…

WWBIC works with both women and men by offering relevant business classes, business loans up to $250,000, assistance with personal financial management, and connections to people who can make things happen for business owners and entrepreneurs across the state of Wisconsin. These classes and technical assistance help business owners document th ...…

Stephen and Chris McDiarmid of Gorilly Goods, a certified organic raw healthy snack maker in Jackson, Wisconsin talk about how their dehydration process and unique flavor profiles make them defensibly unique from other snack brands. Because they have such a unique product, they had to frequently dialogue with grocery stores about the best place ...…

Jeff Glazer of the UW Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic talks about how the type of entity you form matters in terms of your strategic path to grow and what kinds of money you are able to raise to support that growth. When raising equity, find legal counsel that understands what you need to do to comply with securities law and its required disclo ...…

Jeff Glazer of the UW Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic talks about the issues with trademarks for food and beverage businesses. Since selling food or beverages like beer are about selling your brand, protecting that brand and its growth in value through the trademark process is very important. The United States is one of the few countries in the ...…

Distribution rights matter a great deal for breweries and distilleries. Talking with a lawyer who has training and experience in the matter is the best way to protect the financial future of your beer brand. Whether or not you are a brewery vs. a brewpub matters a great deal to regulators. In Wisconsin, breweries get one on-brewery premise tap ...…

Bill Anderson of Creme de la Coulee is a Wisconsin local artisan cheese maker who uses a CSA model through a cheese of the month club to connect directly with consumers. He talks about what it takes to grow a local artisan cheese company and what you have to consider when thinking about scaling that up. There are many advantages of the infrastr ...…

Matt D'Amour, Co-Founder and Chief of Yumbutter™, talks about the concept of a brand in general and the importance of having multiple things that distinguish your food brand so you can remain defensibly unique. There are many challenges in growing a national food brand and it is important to raise the right amount of money (usually more than yo ...…

The Food Finance Institute and Edible-Alpha® are launching the Edible-Alpha® podcast! Edible-Alpha® is a digital resource hub providing people with actionable insights, training, resources and tools so they can build and fund the next generation of profitable food, beverage and value-added farm businesses. There are, unfortunately, many bad bus ...…