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Posted by Asako Tsumagari on 21 Oct 2007, (44) Comments — Electronics Home & Garden |
Plain 'ol egg -- average opportunity
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Introduction to this startup concept
Chocolate is the king of sweets. Take a look around and you find so many kinds of chocolates, from low quality ones to high quality ones, and from 75% cacao chocolate bars to truffles.
The movie “Charlie and Chocolate Factory” has stirred the imagination of magical process of how chocolate is manufactured and sent to your pallet.
The question is, can we make it at home? Actually, you can. You can make chocolate at home like you can make ice cream, and bread, or brew fresh expresso. The only difference is that there’s no simple automatic “chocolate maker” as there are bread makers, ice cream makers, and expresso machines.
This weeks’ new startup idea is the commercialized home chocolate maker and supplies, which will target consumers during the holiday gifts season. Want your Golden Ticket?
Background: Today’s home chocolate making process
Making chocolate at home today requires a process more complex than that for baking bread or making ice cream. The process is somewhat like processing coffee beans and making ice cream at the same time. Take a look the basic steps involved:
- Roast cacao beans
- Crack or mill beans and take out the nibs (the seeds inside the hard bean shells)
- Grind the nibs so it turns into cocoa liqueur
- Refine and smoothen the cocoa liqueur with additional flavoring and sugar, and it so it turns into a smooth chocolate liquid
- Temper the chocolate by continuing to mix the liquid while you keep it at the exact certain temperature, so as to optimize crystallization
- Mold the chocolate
For more details, please refer to the two great Wiki-How articles that explain the process of making chocolate at home: “How to make chocolate” and “How to make chocolate by hand”. In each step of making chocolate, we have to use alternative cooking devices like juicers and coffee grinders that are not optimized for chocolate making process.
ChocolateAlchmey sells a kit for $525 for making chocolate. The kit includes roasted beans, roasted nibs, and these above-mentioned, non-optimized products like a mill and a melanger. (A mill costs $255 and a melanger costs $410 if purchased alone). The company is closed until Dec 15th, according to the site.
Given the complexity and lack of quick tools for making chocolate at home, I see a great opportunity. Come up with a specialized home chocolate maker and supplies, and then target the holiday shopper.
How to make an attractive proposition?
1) Offer various roasted, pre-processed nibs through an alliance with a known chocolate brand
Both raw and roasted cacao beans and nibs are easily available. So, I suggest you make it easy for the consumer, and go with the latter. Get roasted, pre-processed nibs for consumers as accompanying supplies to your maker. Choose a limited number of kinds of cacao to minimize complexity.
This provides three advantages for your business model:
i) Controlled product performance: You can develop your chocolate maker in an optimized manner, focused on the packages of cacao nibs you would offer. As a result, you increase the chances that consumers successfully make good chocolate.
ii) Strong repeat-purchase revenue model: If you are successful, you may be able to sell a lot of roasted cacao nibs after the initial sale of your maker.
iii) Opportunity to leverage strong chocolate brands: Once you prove your technology works well and there market demand exists, known chocolate brand players may be interested in creating a partnership with you. They may be willing to sell their branded high-premium roasted nibs through you. You should definitely pursue such a partnership, as it will immediately lift your brand awareness and increase sales demand.
2) Engineering the most simple product
You would need to work with experienced engineers to make a product that combines the chocolate-specific grinder, melanger, and temper into one mechanism. Automate the process as much as possible for the end-user by integrating the product as much as possible. By doing so, you will make it easier for the end-user and also reduce your material cost, and thus your starting retail price.
I am not an industrial designer or an engineer, so I would recommend you to work with an engineer and spend time to develop the design.
Mass retail, mass manufacturing model with a consumer price
The most important aspect is the price. If the make is priced at $525, like the one previously mentioned, only a very few consumers would buy.
Home bread-makers cost from $40 to $200. So this chocolate making kit needs to be also around $100-$150.
The only way to achieve this price point is to make it possible to sell the products on a large scale. You need to create economies of scale needed in the manufacturing so you can keep low price point. As a consequence, you must get your product into the Mass Retail Channel in order to succeed.
Again, like the startup idea Healthy Halloween Trick or Treat you will need to target the seasonal shelf space for the holiday seasons. Most retailers will expand their offerings in those categories, like home bread-makers, and home ice cream makers, and may fit in your product as well..
Financing this startup idea
Unlike other ideas I’ve talked about, I think this idea would require financing capacity in the early stage. The R&D process would be more complex, and until you achieve the break-even volume of unit sales, you would be making a loss.
To move forward with this idea, you need to elaborate on the business plan, and try to raise a fund of a few $100,000 dollars from angel investors. Use these funds to create your prototype. With a successful prototype, you would probably need to raise further investment to support commercialization.
The good news is if you become successful, you will likely find an exit by selling your business to large manufacturers like Cuisineart, Hamilton Beach, KitchenAid, and Braun.
Who should pursue this startup idea
With the risk profile, I hope you have a good enough saving before you take on this idea. Also it would be ideal if you have an R&D background of electronics appliances.
Comments for "Home Chocolate Factory: Chocolate maker and supplies"
22 Oct 2007 at 11:27 AM
Hi Asako,
Mmmmmmm. Chocolate. Who can refuse a great piece of chocolate?
It’s probably a good thing that’s an at home chocolate maker is expensive. That could be deadly for the diet....
Question though? What are the rules/regulations an at home food based business must follow?
24 Oct 2007 at 11:45 PM
Hello Barbara,
Good question on the rules/regulations on at-home food based business.
While overall FDA will set the safety requirements and approvals, I believe there are State level requirements as well. First, you need to register your business with the State, and get a license specifically for your food business, I believe.
Then, I believe there will be an inspection on the food processing facility (or your home) in terms of how you store food, where you are processing food, how you are packaging food, and how you are storing the final inventories.
Then, there will be import and export regulations you have to follow, for example, if you are importing chocolate beans. Then, you have to follow the labeling requirements by FDA.
But this is my guess. I have an experience of FDA regulated medical devices, but actually not food business.
But I assume it is something a small business owner can manage, based on the fact there are so many small businesses dealing with food, in this country.
Thank you for bringing it up.
26 Oct 2007 at 12:42 AM
Another great idea Asako. People love chocolate. Yet a lot of the stuff you get in the shops is just not very exciting.
And many people are keen to buy the latest kitchen gadget, so it would probably take off well.
Charlie and the Chocolate factory was a brilliant book wasn’t it? I loved it when I was younger - it made me want to build my own chocolate factory.
The film was good, but I think the book was better. The factory I visualised whilst reading the book was much nicer.
I think the key things with this machine would be keeping the costs down and ease of use. Also, public demand for these gadgets seems to die off after a short while, so that would need to be taken into consideration when pricing I suppose.
28 Oct 2007 at 11:51 AM
Hello Catherine,
Public demand for these gadgets in fact die off after a while.
I agree unless it is very simple to use, consumers will only use it for a few times. That may be the reason why we do not see such a product in the store. Chocolate making process is slightly more complicated.
I have a home ice cream maker at home but use it only during holidays when I have time and patience.
Having said that kitchen gadget is a good business, even if the demand dies down, there’s always demand for holiday gifts. And because target market is almost every household in most of developed economies, you always have some demand available to you.
16 Jul 2009 at 04:32 AM
Hello Asako Tsumagari, Firs of all thanks for sharing nice and mouthwatering information you share here on home made chocolate factory. Actually i am searching for rakhi shopping sites because raksha bandhan festival is coming near. So, I want to send rakhis to my brothers on this holy festival. One is living in mumbai and another is living in bangalore. So, i want to send rakhi to bangalore and another is send rakhi to mumbai to my brother. But i found your post and got really very nice info. Thanks for your nice info.
04 Aug 2009 at 07:27 AM
Wherever we go first we should collect details of that place...Here I got information about Hawaii’s Best 150 Restaurants...It will useful for future..
27 Aug 2009 at 09:55 PM
you need 2 follow the following five rules and regulation
1. Ensure that You and Your Home Are Properly Equipped for the Business of Food Production
2. Finance your Home-Based Food Business
3. Register and License Your Home-Based Business
4. Understand the Regulations that Govern Food Production
5. Marketing Your Food Product or Services Online
28 Aug 2009 at 05:50 PM
Making homemade chocolate can be a long process, and it may take many tries and a lot of patience. There are no right or wrong recipes, and a combination of many different ingredients may be used to obtain the desired taste, but practice makes perfect—and the payout makes the hard work well worth it.
[url=http://teddurham1385.tripod.com/panasonicbreadmaker4/index.blog/1936095/improve-your-kitchen-with-a-scientifically-progressive-oster-bread-maker/]Oster
Breadmakers[/url]
09 Sep 2009 at 02:30 AM
What a pity they can’t run the business ethically and professionally now that it has started up and is established. Where did they include in their business plan / startup idea “commit internet fraud” or “make false customs declarations to avoid paying duty / taxes”? That’s what they do now. I have had the misfortune of doing business with this company in the past few months. They take money and don’t supply the goods, or, in a recent case, made a false customs declaration and lied on the shipping notice claiming that the package contained goods which it did not.
They refuse to reply to emails and Michael, lying SOB, put the phone down on me when I managed to contact him when he wasn’t expecting.
Unfortunate for the consumer that this startup concept should ever have got off the ground. They should be in prison.
14 Sep 2009 at 03:43 AM
Great stuff.
18 Sep 2009 at 01:54 AM
Chocolate maker for sale in UK called Ready Steady Cook.
18 Sep 2009 at 03:10 AM
How to make bread yeast?whose machines we used,can i find the production yeast line for 2500 ton/day?
27 Sep 2009 at 01:10 PM
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