In The Loop: Foodtrepreneur 101
Part of In The Loop: Circular Food Economy, a full day at Brighton Block on Wednesday, October 7 during Edmonton Startup Week. See the full day and register for the main event: https://luma.com/ixdy9g2v
Pick your path. Build your brand. Connect your tech. Get in the Kitchen.
Most people who start a food business start for the love of food. Very little of what happens next is actually about cooking.
This session brings together four entrepreneurs for the parts nobody teaches.
Michelle Frechette of The Connected Kitchen Project Foundation opens on picking a path rather than staying in your lane — the difference between a caterer, a co-packer, a market vendor or a retail brand, and why choosing intentionally and early saves you from paying twice (or sometimes even more). She'll also cover where each path actually leads for permits and licensing, a siloed world with no map and no single front door, and where you can find other resources. Attendees will leave able to name which kind of food business they actually want to build, and what that choice commits them to.
Katie Dooley of Paper Lime Creative follows on defining your customer and building a brand around them. She'll unpack what branding actually is beyond a logo, plus how your brand voice becomes the foundation for every other branding decision that follows. Using real-world food brand case studies she will reveal why standing out and staying consistent both matter to your bottom line. Attendees will leave with a practical exercise to define their own ideal customer and start applying it to their business right away.
Saida Barre of BITO Lab connects you with your tech. You have a real product people can buy on a Saturday, but what about the rest of the days? She'll show you how to test whether your plan for reaching customers actually works before you spend a dime. How to frame the real problem you're solving so customers keep buying from you every other day of the week. Attendees will leave able to pressure-test which channel is worth building based on their ideal customer before committing to it.
Peter Keith of Scale Kitchens brings it back to the kitchen. He sees food businesses at the exact moment they outgrow a home kitchen and have to find a licensed one. He'll cover what shared kitchen space costs, what to ask before you commit to any of it, and what having other foodtrepreneurs in the building does for a business that has been running out of somebody's basement. Attendees will leave knowing what their next kitchen actually needs to do for them, and what questions to ask before signing anything.
It runs as an interactive workshop, not a panel. Four segments across two hours, with questions taken throughout, and the room is capped at 24 so people can actually ask about their own situation.
For foodtrepreneurs at ideation or early stages — people selling at farmers' markets, running food trucks, doing small-batch production and looking to get into a shared kitchen, or still working out whether they have a business at all. No prerequisites. Someone who has been operating for five years and someone who has not yet sold anything will both get something out of it.
This breakout runs inside In The Loop: Circular Food Economy.
Be there or be square.