Start your successful food business for under £600

We did it, and so can you!

Over the years, a lot of people have asked me how they should go about starting their new business - and many of them are now launched and doing well! It’s important to know where to start with your business, so this will be the first in a series of blog posts about how to start (and grow) your very own health food company!

To start us off, I’m going to share a step-by-step blueprint of how I launched LoveRaw for less than £600!

When dealing with small budgets, you need to be extremely smart about how you operate. You need to save on everything, so that means beg, borrow, and blag as much as you can to get ahead. When I started with LoveRaw, we were still feeling the effects of the recession, which made things even more tricky! In the long run, I’m actually grateful for that timing because it made me think outside the box.

Back in 2013 I was based in Spain after taking a step back from working a soulless desk job whilst mourning the death of my father. I’d been ready for a change and wanted to better my situation, so made a conscious transition towards healthy eating. This led to a product idea that I needed to share it with the world. Unfortunately, I didn’t have:

• Any capital to get me off the ground
• Wealthy parents to fund me
• Eager investors to fund me
• Crowdfunding (Kickstarter was in their infancy back then!)
• Contacts in the food industry

So, I needed to do some serious hustling. Here’s a list of all the money I spent to secure an order of £13,000 from Wholefoods Market UK:

• Flight back to the UK from Spain - £83.28
• Website, domain and hosting - £25.00
• Business cards (incl. Design and printing) - £50.00
• Packaging & Logo freelance designer from Upwork (previously called Elance.com) - £120.00
• Sample kraft packaging run, sourced from Alibaba - £150.00
• Labels for the packaging from my local printer, Minuteman - £30.00
• Incorporation costs for the Ltd company via gov.uk - £12.00
• Organic ingredients from BuyWholefoodsOnline - £79.50
• Advance train ticket to London - £45.00
• TOTAL = £594.78

Yep, for £594.78 I secured an order for £13,000 from Wholefoods UK.

The key lessons that I learned along the way, which have now became the foundations on which LoveRaw operates, are:

• Adapt
• Make Friends
• Innovate
• Validate
• The Disruptive Hustle

My next blog post will detail how each of these key lessons led to my first order of £13,000. If you want to get it as soon as it’s out, add your email into our mailing list below.

I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments below too, so don’t be a stranger - drop me a line with your thoughts and tell me what I can do to help! Who knows, I might even write a blog post about it!

Rimi x