The food and beverage sector is booming. Restaurant openings rose 10% in 2023 compared to 2022 — even higher than in pre-pandemic years.
From fine dining to food trucks, farmers to brewers, and wholesalers to coffee makers, there are opportunities across the food and beverage industry.
But starting a business without covering the basics — your operations plan, marketing tactics, financial strategy, and more — carries huge risks.
That’s why we recommend you write a business plan.
Writing a business plan is an easy first step that you can start for free. Plus, businesses that take time to plan are significantly more successful than those that don’t.
Many food and beverage establishments fail because of one of the following:
Writing a business plan can help you:
If you’re looking for funding from investors for your business, you’ll definitely need a business plan.
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Many business plans follow a standard format and you can use it as a starting point when writing your own plan. Here’s what that includes:
For food and beverage companies, you must give extra attention to your market analysis, operations plan, and financial forecasts.
If you’re ready to start, download a free business plan template and fill it out as you read this article.
Every business plan should include an executive summary. It’s a brief outline summarizing the plan, no more than one or two pages.
We recommend that you write the executive summary last after fleshing out the details of your plan.
Just summarize the vision for your business, describe your offerings and target market, and touch on your management team and financials. Don’t go into tons of detail — just provide a high-level sense of what you want your business to accomplish.
This section of your food and beverage business plan describes the opportunity you hope to capture.
Maybe you’re a farmer looking to diversify your revenue streams by distributing to grocery stores. Or a bar owner with high-end liquor that competitors in the market aren’t serving.
Whatever your business is, describe the gap in the market and how you aim to fill it.
If you’re operating a more common type of business, like a restaurant, you can probably keep this section short. But it’s useful to document what makes your business unique and it will help focus your sales and marketing efforts later on.
In a field as crowded with competitors as the food and beverage space, a detailed market analysis is essential.
Your focus should be on identifying the specific customer segments you aim to serve.
Maybe you’re a butcher with connections to fresh livestock. Will you be more successful selling directly to consumers, or should you focus on selling to grocery stores and markets in your area?
Or, you’re opening a diner. Should your menu focus on healthy meals or easy-to-make child-friendly options?
These are the types of questions that market research helps you answer. This section should detail the defining characteristics of your target market, including the demographics and preferences of your ideal customer and the size of the market you’re targeting. Market research questions specific to a food and beverage business could include:
Elaborate on how your food and beverage offerings align with that target market’s needs. Remember, you can’t please everyone, so focus on a specific group of people or type of person and build out from there.
For food and beverage businesses promotions are how you stand out and seize a share of your market.
The marketing and advertising chapter of your business plan is where you’ll detail your strategies for capturing the attention — and loyalty — of the customers you identified as your target market in the previous section.
With so many options for consumers in the food and beverage space, you’ll likely have to rely on multiple marketing channels, including::
It doesn’t matter how delicious your recipes are, how fresh your crops are, or how innovative your cocktails are — if you don’t operate efficiently, your business probably won’t last long.
The operations strategy may be the most detailed section of your business plan, especially if you’re writing it for a bank loan or investment. This section describes how you will run your business day to day.
When writing the operations section, describe the following:
Whether it’s a restaurant, a farm, or a food transportation business, describe the space you’re operating in, and all of the physical assets and equipment you’ll need to be successful.
If it’s a sit-down restaurant, consider including a floorplan mockup in your appendix.
List the suppliers and partners that get your product to customers. Think about the businesses you purchase ingredients from, the warehouses that goods are stored in, and the trucking companies that deliver your products to grocery stores.
These are your supply chain partners. It’s crucial that you maintain good relationships with them.
How long it takes to make your product, and what materials and equipment are required. Documenting how you produce your goods or services demonstrates that you understand the costs of making them.
You may also uncover ways to produce them more quickly, or at a lesser cost.
Detail how you’ll handle matters of efficiency like order fulfillment, storage, shipping, and returns, as well as customer satisfaction. If you provide delivery services, document how you will handle the process of getting your product to customers’ homes or businesses.
List your staffing needs, training, and experience requirements for key staff. Also, document the management structure of your business.
This helps ensure that important tasks you don’t have time to monitor are being done and that workers are being supervised.
Describe investments in payment processing systems, inventory management software, and other tools that support sales or operations in your business. Cataloging your technology systems will help you determine where it might make sense to invest in upgrades for efficiency.
Take some time to write a financial plan. Create detailed financial projections, including sales, expenses, and profitability.
If that sounds intimidating, take a deep breath, and remember that financial forecasts are really just best guesses. If you’re running an existing business, you can start with your previous year’s numbers. If you’re starting, make an educated guess about where you hope to be financially a year from now.
Investors will want to see a:
If you use a tool like LivePlan, you’ll be able to build out your financial forecasts relatively quickly, even if you don’t have experience with business numbers.
Even if you aren’t seeking investment, the financial plan is crucial for understanding the viability of your business. It allows you to adjust your business model based on projected performance, and make informed decisions about where to spend your money.
If you want to see how other food and beverage businesses have created their plans, check out our free library of food and beverage business plans.
You can download all of them in Word format and jump-start your own business plan.
