How to market a food product?

How to go about getting a food product idea to market?

• Basically my friend has a food product that. It's a home made recipe that from what I've seen isn't in the mainstream market as of now. He wants to try and get it to ...show more

• Answer:

  First thing is to see if people actually like it enough to buy it and I don't mean your family. That it isn't in the mainstream market is a clue that it's not a mainstream product, though it could be that it could become that. There's no reason to move forward if nobody wants your product enough to buy it. There's a difference between having somebody over for dinner and they say "Yum" but they don't actually want to pay to have it in their own kitchen. Then it will need to be commercially packed and you'll need to get a lab to do a nutritional study. Then you'll need a distributor. The other path is to do flea markets and street fairs for a start. It still needs to be commercially packed but that's a way to get a feel for the market and it's a LOT cheaper than buying 1000 cases of something from a packer.