Venture Concept No. 2

Revised Venture Concept

Opportunity:

Many professionals today struggle with simply what to eat for lunch at work. Currently, there are many options to chose from to satisfy this need including ordering in food by popular delivery services (ie. Grubhub or Postmates) or leaving to eat at a local restaurant. Recently, dining has taken a turn to support many restaurants that are quick-serve or fast causal, ie. Chipotle or Grille Fresh. This restaurant style is marked by the ability to walk through the line and assemble a meal, without waiting on a waitress. However, none of these options seem to address the specific concern that drives professionals midday: the desire to avoid any further decisions. For many, this means that they simply eat random snacks available to them or eat nothing all together, figuring they can wait it out until dinner time. Avoiding eating meals midday can have detrimental impacts on one’s health, as missing meals can impact blood sugar and stamina for the rest of the day. 

There is a rising phenomenon among professionals called decision fatigue. Decision fatigue explains that there is an underlying stress thats caused by making an abundance of decisions throughout the day, regardless of how small they are. While deciding what to eat for lunch is a low stress decision, it is just one more thing for a person to have to chose in the day. The rising popularity of at-home meal kits that require assembly, such as BlueApron or Hello Fresh, indicate that people want the comfort of homestyle food, yet are okay with selecting off a limited menu. In essence, people seem to want to be told from few options what they can eat after a busy day. 

The market for this service and associated products are:

-Single, or childless individuals

-Professionals that are moderately affluent

-Those who work outside of the home for more than 40 hours per week

Geographically, there appears to be a need for this in cities of moderate size, such as Metro Detroit as it is unpopular to commute to work on foot and pass many restaurants all day long. As such, these areas are populated by those with cars and are spread out enough that finding a mid day meal may require driving somewhere new. This service would not be marketed towards those who are looking to save money by meal prepping, attain specific health goals with their meals, or those who enjoy cooking and preparing meals. Although some customers in our ideal demographic may enjoy the midday break of leaving an office to obtain lunch, a recent study in Washington state indicated that 56% of office employees still only have 30 minutes for lunch. This supports that many may be avoiding the process due to the time it takes. 

Innovation:

A daily meal kit service would provide healthy, tasteful food delivered to a customers door step at the beginning and middle of each week. These kits would be ordered online with a menu of 10 items and ordering would follow a weekly process:

1. On Thursday’s, a customers 5 meals for the week would be selected from the 10 options 
2. These meals would be delivered to their doorstep on Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon, to ensure freshness. Meals would be delivered in vibrant blue containers, gaining attention in the workplace from coworkers in busy office spaces.
3. Pricing would be comparable to local quick-serve lunch options, at approximately $10 a plate and available for monthly subscription payment as an option. 
4. This concept is moderately innovative, as meal delivery services have existed before and have grown in popularity, however they are typically larger organizations that must ship their meals in cooler boxes and require assembly, targeting those who have an interest in cooking but feel under skilled in that process. By organizing my venture locally, I would be able to avoid the shipping costs and risk associated with transporting perishable items and also prioritize local venders and farmers for my supplies. In Metro Detroit, there does not seem to be an organization that offers these services to my specific demographic. My “unfair advantage” would be the exceptional service that my organization would offer. I would be particular with my staff to provide consistent, outstanding service and crowd favorite recipes that would keep my customers loyal to me. 

Venture Concept:

Customer’s would likely be intrigued by this system and be enticed to try it out on a promotion. The challenge would likely be keeping customers after their trial ran out. For this to be successful, I think a launch promotion would need to be limited, so the service is not quickly deemed a luxury. Ideally, customers would be subscribing for multiple meals per week, if not a full 5 days. I think it would be easy to entice customer’s for their trial and switch from their current method because most of our demographic appears unsatisfied with their current situation. This organization would likely begin in a very small scale way with a few employees helping to cook and deliver orders, an IT person to monitor the set up of the website and organize the ordering system. These roles would be loosely defined at first and, as we expanded, specialize further into a department that manages orders and purchases supplies for meal production, preparation line cooks, recipe testers and developers, delivery staff, and administrative staff for managing finances. A second kitchen and distribution center would be able to expand and represent the growing volume of orders. As quickly as I could afford to do so, I would also like to open a small storefront where customers could sample meals and test out our products before committing to our subscription.

In 5 years, I see this model being developed as a way to raise capital for my future business, a farm to table restaurant. A restaurant made with local, rotating ingredients on a specialized menu would be my dream business to operate, however the start up costs for something like that would be very high. I do not see this meal kit service being a business to start and grow and sell, as I think one of it’s strongest attributes is the connection to community members. As such, I would not intend to grow and centralize it, similar to HelloFresh. 

Feedback: I received extensive positive feedback on my Venture Concept No. 1 and it encouraged me that there would be a fair size market to pursue here. My potential customers offered that it may be a good idea to offer a line of specifically simple, health conscious meals to attract that demographic. Although this is not my intended market, simpler options may appeal to other customers too and for that reason it seems that these would be great options to include. Additionally, I was encouraged to open a storefront as soon as possible to serve as a good transition for my business and my future restaurant. 

Final Reflection

Final Reflection:

The most formative experience in this course for me was how active the assignments required me to be. Although I am now a rising senior, this has been one of my most hand-on courses. Although that required me to prepare much differently than an exam based model, I believe these exercises have challenged me in wonderful ways and given practical skills to my business degree. I’ll remember most the self reflection assignments, ie. Idea Napkins, that required me to connect my personal skills with tangible aspects of my business model. I thought critically about myself and the value that I offer in ways that boosted my confidence greatly. I appreciated our “Secret Sauce” assignment also, where we interviewed those closest to us to reveal our strongest qualities. These were some touching moments with my loved ones that both affirmed and surprised me. 

I was also blown away at how willing strangers were to discuss with me for the extensive phone interviews in this course. I often found myself assuming that small business owners or experts would hang up, feeling that I was wasting their time. I learned so much from these phone interviews and challenged my own assumptions. This experience taught me that much of market research does not need to be conducted in a lab — polling people voluntarily can provide great insight. I stepped out of my comfort zone for these assignments and I am incredibly proud of that. 

I feel that this course has pushed me towards an entrepreneurial mindset by taking the pressure off of one career path. Entrepreneurship has begun to shape my life by making me more willing to take a step out into the world and change my mind. For example, I could start a business and use it as capital for a future business and this may be a short term goal. In my mind, I believe I was too hung up on the long term implications of every choice, rather than being willing to try something and change it when it stops working. This adaptability is wildly important, but seldom talked about. 

I would recommend to students going into this class that they think for a while before committing to a business model to continue with. I worked through a few different options before settling on the business that I worked out the rest of the course. This required that I take a look at the assignments ahead of time to plan out some content and see which ideas were most feasible. Additionally, students should be very familiar with the assignments well before the deadline. Many assignments in this course required contact with other people and should be planned in advance to provide quality work.