Specialty Food Marketing: It's Not Just About the Product

On Sunday, the Daily Recordin New Jersey posted a great article on a new Food-Preneur Boot Camp program at Farleigh Dickinson University, which helps specialty food entrepreneurs learn the ropes of creating, packaging and marketing specialty food products.

A couple of quick highlights from the article:

”The Food-Preneur classes are gaining traction because nobody else is offering them,” [Domenick] Celentano [of Celentano Company] said. “Food is a popular business for people to start because they can create the prototype products in their kitchen.”

Also, the specialty-food industry is booming to the tune of $50 billion a year, he told participants. It rose more than 24 percent between 2005 and 2007…

While the article makes some interesting points about why to go into the specialty food business, it also makes the point that it’s not just about creating something tasty and expecting people to love it. 90% of all specialty food products (and processed food products in general) don’t succeed. So how do you make your product stand out?

One tip is to have good packaging. According to the article:

Good packaging informs customers about a product in addition to preserving and protecting it, she explained. Great packaging also attracts them to the product. Holding a bottle of Demeter’s Pantry Taste of Crete Organic Olive Oil, she said it stands out on shelves because of its gold foil top and its bottle tag, which offers information about the oil and the story of the company.

But going further than this, I feel that the brand and website of a product also makes a huge difference in the success of a new product, especially when the product is intended as a luxury/gourmet item. The more expensive the price point, the better your brand needs to look; customers who are purchasing these productsoften care as much about how it looks on the shelf as they do how it tastes.

By the way, the same holds true for body care, wine and candles, where customers time and again will actually make purchases based exclusively on packaging and/or scent.