Flourish Business Plan Report

Flourish Business Plan Report
Student Name
Course
Professor
Institutional Affiliation
City, State
Due Date
Flourish Business Plan Report
Background Information Critical to Strategic Level Investigation
Business Venture Overview and Evaluation
African Local Recipe Box Packaging and Delivery is a registered start-up venture, which can be categorized as a sole proprietor company. The business will be registered with Companies House as Flourish. The business venture is within the food delivery business industry. Flourish will focus on delivering packaged food ingredients to designated customers. The targeted customers are the African & Caribbean professionals such as nurses, social workers, doctors, and teachers. These groups of people would love their local foods but do not have access to the indigenous raw ingredients from African countries. Therefore, the Flourish business is premised on the need to meet market gaps and needs and thus satisfy the target population's insatiable appetites for ethnic meals and snacks. On this basis, the new venture would import these and package them for delivery to diverse customer segments. Supermarkets would also constitute a critical target audience for the new venture's products. The retail outlets are essential points where African and Afro-Caribbean professionals can access packaged meals and snacks. The customer segment focus would also meet the needs of populations of other nationalities keen on experiencing African foods, especially those who frequent the African-Caribbean restaurants.
Corporate Drive, Mission, and Vision Statements, Slogan, Values
Flourish will manufacture, package, and distribute ethnic ready-to-eat foods of African and Afro-Caribbean origin. It would set up local shops where African and Caribbean citizens and expatriates who reside in the United Kingdom can easily access them while doing their grocery shopping activities. The corporate drive is that every food product needs an opportunity to gain interest and traction among consumers. The business mission is to produce yummy, safe, and pocket-friendly ready-to-eat (RTE) African and Afro-Caribbean ethnic meals and snacks. The vision is to be the leading producer of RTE African and Afro-Caribbean ethnic meals and snacks. The slogan is: "Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness." In addition, the corporate values include reliability, customer-oriented, passion, and innovation. The company firmly holds that each delicacy deserves a chance to gain interest and traction among consumers, irrespective of its ethnicity and origin. Consumer cravings are characterized by the need for new tastes, new variants, and looks of meals and snacks. This is one of the gaps that the firm is seeking to bridge. While meeting this market need, the company remains careful not to compromise taste, food safety, and quality.
Market Gaps in East London
Through survey and inquiries from the target customers in the African and Caribbean communities within East London and ultimately gradually widened to other parts of the nation. These communities do not have the time and expertise to source the ingredients to cook their local delicacies. This is a gap in the market as these people must pay high prices to import these items individually. Once they have a UK-based supplier, it will be easy and within their grasp when they require the products. They will also have the added advantage of doorstep delivery or pick up from their local Afro-Caribbean shops. They will use cars for regional distribution and a dispatch rider to cover other Boroughs with East London. The whole ingredients for the recipes they want to cook will be available inside the pack. The ingredients packed will meet the needs of the most commonly easy-to-cook recipes. These services will benefit the professionals who do not have the time to go out and find the ingredients in different locations, where it will not be guaranteed they will find the ingredients.
The demand for ethnic ingredients has become increasingly high in the UK. The combination of these ingredients has been dubbed as Super Foods imports, and the largest consumers of these products are African and Caribbean customers who reside in the country. Even though these populations currently rely on suppliers of these products, it has become essential to understand the source of these products. In that way, Flourish can contact the sources to supply these products and deliver them to these customer segments. Statistically, the UK has a low self-sufficiency rate of vegetables at only 58%, while the demand for superfoods has grown to over 70% in recent years (Ferrer, 2021, n.p). Given the complexities involved in the export processes, it would be difficult for our new start-up to begin the process of getting involved in the import market. We have to rely on already established distributors to reduce costs involved in the supply chain process and thus enhance business growth and sustainability. Notably, there are many cities in the UK. That said, the objective is to set up ten local businesses in the leading cities because most of these African Caribbean customers are urbanites.
The core focus on value addition lies in our capacity to source these highly demanded African and Caribbean cuisines and then make them available to this customer segment section by creating local delivery options that these customers do not have access to at the moment. These local delivery options include local brick-and-mortar store shops within East London, where most targeted customers are. Another value addition is creating an online convenience store that gives customers more accessible access to the store. It will also be possible to directly deliver the delicacies to customers using uber and motorcycle riders at their convenience. As earlier noted, there is a high demand for ethnic delicacies, especially those increasingly costly and time-consuming to prepare because of high import tariffs/duties on the already prepared snacks directly imported from their source jurisdictions. The leading distributors would be supermarkets that dominate the retail industry, including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Walmart (Asda), and Morrisons. Therefore, understanding the critical marketing and operational activities is crucial to ensuring the start-up's success and attaining sustainability thresholds.
Evaluation of Case Study Organization
HelloFresh Value Proposition Analysis
HelloFresh provides at-home meal delivery solutions every week through a membership-based business model. The company operations are anchored on a vertically integrated supply chain. It directly sources its ingredients from an integrated network of over 1,500 suppliers based on the "just in time" model. HelloFresh then apportions and packages the meals within its product centers. Meals-kits are availed to the consumers through 3PL and certain portions through the in-house fleet. The value proposition for consumers has several dimensions, including convenience, selection, and price. Regarding convenience, the company enables families to save time and resources by shopping (avoiding a trip to the grocery store) and planning (via its curated recipes) while ensuring they enjoy healthy nutrition. In addition, consumers receive weekly recipes with essential ingredients in the needed quantities (Kapoor, 2021, n.p). The consumers also want flexibility in terms of having the autonomy to pause the program at any given time within a one-week notice, reducing trial and reactivation friction.
The customers can select over 30 recipes every week across four price-differentiated brands that serve diverse customer segments. The brand includes Green Chef ("specialty" organic, premium brand that serves niches including gluten-free and vegan), EveryPlate and Chefs Plate ("value" brands that are available across Australia, Canada, and the US), and HelloFresh (the "affordable premium" legacy brand that is available across the world). Furthermore, the consumer costs coincide with what they are willing to pay at the grocery stores, 40 to 50 percent less than the takeaway cost. In this vein, consumers pay nearly EUR 50 per order every week (this could vary across countries) and order 14 times per year on average (Kapoor, 2021, n.p).
Figure 1: HelloFresh Brands
Product development at HelloFresh entails creating a meal kit box, primarily the tertiary packaging, incorporating a cooling pouch as well as two or more kits. The crucial role of the cardboard box is containment, unitization, and apportionment. The kits constitute paper bags with ingredients for each meal that do not require cooling. Irrespective of whether the covering meal product is already wrapped, it is a secondary or primary packaging. For example, in the case of rice, it is secondary packaging since the rice would be packed within a bag. In contrast, potatoes, which only come in a transport packaging to HelloFresh, need primary packaging. Every kit is enclosed with the same color sticker and number similar to the recipe card. In this way, the user easily recognizes the bag to take for each meal or snack. Therefore, the primary product development efforts include apportionment, containment, unitization, as well as communication to the ultimate consumer (Bauer, 2020, p.8). The figure below explains the product development efforts by HelloFresh.
Figure 2: Meal Kit Box
The business model canvas below summarizes how HelloFresh creates value by integrating core aspects, including sales and marketing, finance, and operations management. The company's key partners include professional chefs and logistic companies. The management believes that these are central to meeting their customer's needs and sustaining its operations in the long term. The key activities include recipe curation as well as food preparation. Marketing is critical to ensure continuous presentation, help with new customers while retaining the existing ones, and attain higher sales revenues. The essential resources include social media platforms and customer data. The company's value proposition includes healthy ingredients and recipes to awaken the chef inside the enterprise. In addition, all the ingredients come prepared to save customers' time and resources. Flourish will also do weekly delivery at their customer's doorstep. The distribution channels include home delivery and only business presence. The consumer segment includes customers with a healthy appetite. The cost structure includes recipe curation, staff, marketing and sales, and logistics. The company earns revenue via a monthly subscription model (Business Models Inc., 2022, n.p).
Figure 3: HelloFresh Business Model Canvas
Business Venture's Planned Development
Our primary business model utilizes the delivery business model to reach our widely distributed customers within the United Kingdom. The main business products we will be involved in include the Moringa products, cocoa products, Quinoa, peas, and beans delivered to our purchasing customers. These products will be obtained from the identified suppliers above, stored in our local inventory stores, and then distributed to our customers through our established retail outlets, including the ten brick and mortar stores. The retail e-commerce platforms will be the primary customer attraction tools because they will reach the intended market share group (Deloitte LLP, 2019, n.p). From the information obtained above, it becomes clear that our primary business activity will include obtaining these super ingredient foods from the identified ...