#160 Retail Ready and Food Biz Wiz Podcast - Allison Ball

Meaningful Marketplace Podcast

It was three years ago we interviewed Allison “Alli” Ball, founder of Retail Ready and Food Biz Wiz Podcast. It was episode 59 for those of you who want to listen again, or if you missed it the first time. Alli is a former grocery buyer who shares her insider secrets to help packaged food entrepreneurs scale up their sales. She knows what buyers are looking for and what key information buyers need to start a conversation with an entrepreneur, or “foodpreneur” as Alli calls them. She shares many great hints and perspectives in her weekly podcast show, which recently posted its 200th episode. The whole idea of Food Biz Wiz Podcast is to help food founders step up their strategy, get on the shelf and grow their business. Alli brings in industry experts, students from her Retail Ready program and draws on Alli’s career as a buyer to help listeners get into that buyer mindset to understand how to best communicate and persuade grocery store buyers. While it’s incumbent on all entrepreneurs to soak up all the free information available, there is a limit to where that can take them. To get the secret sauce, you need to pay for someone else’s knowledge and contacts that they, in turn, had to pay for to get that most valuable knowledge. Retail Ready® is the program offered by Alli which gives founders the tools, strategies, and support they need to get on retail and e-tail shelves, and to have high sales once they are there. Retail Ready has schooled over 2,500 founders with emerging food brands with curriculum, live strategic support, accountability and a live community for the tools to set up sales systems to get on the shelves. The program is for food brands in production or just ready for production, but not early stage food development. It’s 90-day program, which is a big change since our last show with Alli, when the program was 12 months. The reason? Each foodpreneur had a different set of circumstances, based on their food category, geography, finances, energy and so forth. Some people would breeze through the program in 30 days, while others would complete the 12-month program and sign on for another 12 months. Alli found that when she told prospective students that the program was 12 months it turned them off. The Retail Ready team did a survey of students and found that the 90-day mark was the success point for most of them and so the dialog was changed to a 90-day program and it has been well received. And since many of the founders in the program re-enroll and want to stay part of the valuable community, the program is really more of a “go at your own pace” experience anyway, so the 90-day label really doesn’t matter once a foodpreneur has started. The other new wrinkle since interviewing Alli last time, is the 90-day program also includes one-on-one support sessions in addition to all the video courses. There are courses for which the foodpreneur has perpetual access and some that require monthly subscriptions. Find out more at her website: www.foodbizwiz.com. Follow Alli on Instagram @itsalliball, Facebook @foodbizwiz, LinkedIn @Allison Ball. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

Thank you for Listening to The Meaningful Marketplace Podcast with your hosts, Sarah Masoni of Oregon State University's Food Innovation Center and Sarah Marshall, owner of Marshall's Haute Sauce. Connect with us on Instagram @meaningfulmarketplacepodcast.

Audio engineer, mixer, and podcast editor: Haley Bowers
Show logo was designed by Anton Kimball of Kimball Design
Production Coordinator: Kayleen Veatch