Market Entry Strategy For A Food Startup

The client is an early stage start-up enabling restaurants and commercial kitchens to reach consumers in more locations and effectively sell a whole lot more. Their primary business is a physical, brick-and-mortar marketplace for restaurant meals by the name 'Foodbox'. The client wanted to diversify into a new service wherein it could partner with different restaurants and enable them do targeted sampling and new product testing. Our client wanted to assess the following through a primary research exercise:

• Acceptability of the idea among restaurants
• Rating around proposed features
• Pricing and payout model
• Market gaps and expectations

Approach

The key activities in project execution were as follows:

• We shortlisted growth-hungry restaurants excluding multi-national restaurant chains like McDonalds, Dominos etc., dhabas, lounges, clubs and bars.
• We defined certain parameters to segregate growth-hungry restaurants and developed a common understanding with the client defining the most relevant features of growth-hungry restaurants.
• Restaurants were shortlisted across various categories like cafes, fine-dine, quick-service restaurants etc. and various cuisines like Chinese, South Indian, North Indian, Italian etc. for the purpose of research.
• Appointments were scheduled with restaurant owners/key decision makers.

Outcome

The research generated valuable insights around:

• Go/no-go for the business idea
• Current services subscribed and their measurable benefits
• Right pricing and pricing model (free/ad based/commission based/fixed fee) for the service
• 'Must have' and 'Good to have' features in the service
• Additional expectations from the service