Healthy eating initiative for local businesses

Last night I attended the "Crawley Business Debate"; an event organised by Crawley Borough Council and indeed it was a lively debate with a good deal of interraction between the range of business and council representatives present. Hosted by Jeremy Taylor of CADIA (the voice of businesses in the Gatwick Diamond), it certainly had the right ingredients.

What was very interesting and had me sitting on my hands for fear of leaping up to have my say, was the recurrent issues of feeding and servicing employees in Manor Royal (and other business areas), the abhorrance of reliance on a burger van visiting, and the key factors of traffic on the crowded roads in the area; over 31,000 people travel into the Crawley area each day to work and 86,000 work in total!

Indeed, Easit (who are also featured at the Polishing the Diamond event next week) got several namechecks regarding their lift-sharing system during the debate, and I feel that Go4Fresh should have equal prominence!

Of course, with Go4Fresh's proposition we can address many of the issues that arose:

• Our machines can be filled once a day, outside of normal traffic hours
• we deliver safe and healthy food at any time of day
• we remove the need for staff to drive into town (its too far to sensibly walk from say, Manor Royal)
• all the packaging (of Nibbles' products) is 100% biodegradeable and we can even collect it all

..so I waited until the end of the debate and took my opportunity to collar the Council members!

Many of the council members should now be attending the Polishing the Diamond Event next Friday, at which we obviously feature and will launch, so they should get a really good handle on what we are about, but what I am hoping for (and I told them this) is be some backing and support from the Council to promote the facility that we offer. This would help us (in the same way as it has Easit) get in front of the bigger businesses around the Crawley area, and perhaps more importantly, to promote to the 86,000 workers the fact that there is a means of having accessible, healthy, short shelf-life foods in their workplace - to create a buzz and build the demand from the consumer end.

Help please, Crawley Council!

Snatched from the jaws of the Dragon

This was it, the day we've been waiting for, the day on which all the work in seeking funding has led toward, all the sweat, tears and late nights was to be decided, by a panel of four, whether Go4Fresh was worth the commercialisation funding that we've been seeking to get our first machines into market.

After an early start to collect some sandwich samples from our excellent supply partner, Nibbles, we tootled off to Camberley to face the" dragons" at FSE's den to pitch our final presentation to the Finance South East (FSE) panel.

It wasnt my best presentation, that's for sure, nerves combined with a lack of clarity of how I should cram everything about our proposition into a 15 minute slot made for a somewhat confused pitch in my opinion. Also, the panel latched onto the previous involvement in our early development by Nestle foods as an issue that could recur and affect the direction of the company, which took valuable time to try and clarify, and I am still not sure that they were convinced that actually, ANY involvement by Nestle in the future would be a good thing, but that we cannot plan for it at this stage of our development.

We got the expected grilling over numbers, but they seemed easier to placate overall with that side of things, and, lets face it, they need to be confident fundamentally that they will at least get their (the tax payer's!) investment back!

I think they were more convinced of future applications and the deployment of our telemetry and inventory control than they were of the fresh, healthy eating proposition, but, with our allotted time up, we had to leave the room - to beat ourselves up about the pitch and await an outcome.

Whilst we de-briefed and commiserated with each other, the panel considered our application. They comprised members who would decide on our application, and four other attendees who have been involved in our application to date (which started last year!); Colin Hayhurst (Portfolio Manager from Gatwick Diamond Hub who's been an absolute stalwart in getting our application to this stage), Steve Wood (Gatwick Diamond Hub Director), Zoe Courtney and Martin Carruthers (Finance South East Fund Manager representatives) who we mwt with a few weeks ago at a pre-qualifying meeting.

The meeting disbanded and Zoe called us in to update us, and there's no doubt we were expecting the worst. But we got it!

I have to say it again, to be sure - We Got It. Sure, there are conditions, and we didnt get the absolute full amount, and its not been allocated quite how we wanted it, which has given us a new raft of work to try and juggle our plans around to ensure we can still get to the same goal, but the over-arching point is that they approved us. I can't begin to explain how long a journey this has felt, and I've only been a passenger on the final part of the ride, but it's a major tick in the approval box that can only help us to gain further recognition and credibility in other circles, as well as give us the capital to build some of our first batch of machines.

So, behind the apparently placid scenes of these scribbles, we are now re-working our costings and timescales to ensure we can meet the conditions placed on us, and our attention is now focussed on the next target - our launch event at the Gatwick Diamond sustainability event "Polishing the Diamond", next Friday (6th June). Lots to do; machines to finish, marketing material to complete and people to speak to!

Hope to see you there!

Food Makers turn to healthy food

At Go4Fresh we are obviously keen on healthy food initiatives, so it is interesting and encouraging to see this post in Reuters today. (thanks @MikeAshworth for the pointer!).

Although the aims of these major brands in this instance appears to be to bolster food prices in a pressured economic situation through delivering percieved extra value, the underlying stats make interesting reading and it all adds further weight to our findings for a demand for healthier food AND for a means of delivering it.

The bottom line from the report is that consumers will generally pay more for a better quality product when times are tough.

To quote the report - “The emergence of so-called health and wellness foods with lower fat, sugar and salt are aimed at keeping consumers buying premium brands even amid the escalating credit crisis, high fuel prices and housing meltdown.”

Some major brands are quoted in the Reuters report and indicate:

• Kraft Foods reported that its “better for you” foods are growing two to three times faster than its other food lines. According to Kraft North America President Rick Searer: “Health and wellness is a priority.”
• In the U.K. Unilever indicated that it has been “cutting out fats, sugars and salt from foods as a way to bolster its health and wellness lines”. Bauke Rower, Senior VP of Foods for the Americas says “The long-term trend towards better food and people looking after themselves is here to stay.”
• France’s Danone cited that the health benefits of its recent introductions of two probiotic products with live bacteria should mean “strong revenue growth.” Even with two price hikes since last August, Danone Chief Executive Juan Carlos Dalto: “We are very optimistic we will see nice double-digit growth in the years ahead in North America.” Even though these two products cost 10-30% more than other yogurts.

I welcome your feedback on this:
> Do you look at pricing first when considering a healthy option?
> Do you think this is just brands seeking to exploit a new opportunity, or are they fulfilling a need?
> What pressures are on you to choose the "healthy option"?
> What constitutes a healthy option to you and where does "freshness" come into consideration, if at all?

Update on funding and progress..

Having built my two initial businesses a long while ago from only a handful of coins and sweat, I had never fully appreciated how much effort and the challenges that are involved to get an innovative idea and turn it into a fully-funded start-up... but I am on a new and exciting learning curve!

When I got involved in Go4Fresh, we needed a small amount of working capital to build the first batch of machines, and had applied to a government funded body for this "friendly" investment. That may not be the correct terminology, but since start-up investment (made famous by TV's Dragons Den) often means parting company with a large chunk of the equity of the business, and this doesnt, then to me it's friendly! That funding has taken since at least last November to get close to realising and, since it is essential for us to buy the components to make the initial batch, our launch date has slowly slipped away.

And so it was that today, after a long, long journey, and an application form that's been back and forth across the internet between us so much that it has its own Airmiles account, we (and Colin, our superb supporter and mentor from the Gatwick Diamond Hub) found ourselves sat with Zoe and Martin from Finance South East for them to quiz us on final queries and details from our funding application.

And it seemed to go well. Very well in fact. The "concerns" pile didnt last long and we had no trouble backing up the information they had received, then we swiftly moved on to how we would be using the money and where the development may continue in the future, and had a good, healthy meeting culminating in the enjoying of some of our fresh food delivery partner company's excellent sandwiches - Thanks Nibbles!

In all, it was a really good meeting and at the end Zoe and Martin advised us that they are recommending us for the final consideration, at the panel on the 28th of May - Hurrah!

What many may not realise is that, in addition to completing the development work on the batch of production machines (by using an outside contractor we are "productionising" the units so that they can be made as cost-effectively as possible, redesigning to use standard components where possible), negotiating with sites, partners and suppliers, developing the branding, the marketing and new opportunities, we are also having multiple meetings, comversations and reviews to business plans to try and make everything as watertight as possible to attract that all-important external funding.

It's hectic!!

So, fingers crossed for us on the 28th, please!

That's incredibly close to our launch date of the 6th June, so we may have to work some wonders to get our production units actually made by soon after that date, but I have some ideas... and the sooner some machines hit the ground (well, offices, hospitals etc) , the sooner we start to earn some revenue!