For as long as you can remember, restaurants have been a startup choice for budding entrepreneurs. You discover you’re good at making delicious food and want to share that with other people. It’s time for a career change, so you try to open a restaurant. There have been countless examples of this being highly successful or failing miserably.
An at-home food business is a viable alternative to a restaurant. Here, you make food at home and sell it online. It could be via delivery on-demand delivery apps or through your own website. In many ways it’s a better business idea/career move than opening a restaurant. If you’re a foodie who’s always been thinking about quitting your job and doing something involving your passion for cooking, here’s why you should consider an at-home food business:
Easier to transition between jobs
When you run a food business from home, you can easily transition between it and your old job. There’s no need to completely sever your ties with an old employer right away. You can go to work and then come home and focus on your food business.
By contrast, this isn’t possible when you open a restaurant. You need more time to focus on setting the restaurant up, running it, managing all the workers, etc. It’s a full-time commitment that means you have to quit your job right away. As such, it’s a bigger risk. With an at-home food business, if things start going well you can transition to part-time work and then do the food stuff full-time. If things go bad, you can just fall back into your current job.
Fewer startup expenses
Starting a restaurant is a very costly endeavor. Did you know that it could cost around $375,000 to set everything up?! Most people don’t have that kind of money lying around, so you’d need a small business loan. It’s a huge financial commitment, which makes it a high-risk business idea.
On the other side of things, starting an at-home food business is much cheaper. It’s the sort of thing you can do without a huge injection of money. Perhaps you sell cupcakes or brownie boxes online. Your only expenses are the ingredients to make the food, your packaging, website costs, and possibly delivery costs. It’s not a free business idea, but it’s certainly less financially demanding, so it carries fewer risks.
Better scalability & more possibilities
Businesses succeed as they gain traction and grow. With a restaurant, it’s hard to scale as things are so expensive. What can you do when your business is going well? The only solution is to open another location – which can double your operating expenses. You can try introducing different services or products, like selling some of the sauces you make at the restaurant. Ideas like this can be successful, but they’re harder to pull off.
An at-home food business has better scalability and way more possibilities. Let’s say you start earning loads of money and want to scale your business. You can move out of your home and rent a proper place to make the food. Or, you could open up pop-up restaurants to attract customers in person. The cost of doing this is way cheaper than starting a permanent restaurant as you’re renting the space for a few days or weeks. You can find a restaurant scheduler to get things in order and hire some temporary staff. There’s also a lower risk involved because you already have a big customer base and there’s interest in your at-home business.
Also, think about the possibilities of an at-home food business: you can sell food products in so many ways. Make food for delivery apps so people can order to eat in, bake products and sell them online, create food kits people can buy and use – the list goes on and on!
Achieve a better work-life balance
Many restaurant owners discover that their restaurant takes over their life. They work long days there and barely have enough spare time. If you start a food business from home, you’ll spend your days working from home. This gives a better work-life balance and you shouldn’t feel as stressed. Sure, you worry about the business succeeding, but you’re not constantly rushing around a busy restaurant kitchen dealing with 101 things at once.
Being able to follow a passion and make a career out of it is a brilliant feeling. There’s nothing better than doing what you love and getting paid for it. As a foodie, you’ve often thought the only way of achieving this is by opening a restaurant. Now, you can see that an at-home food business might be a more viable option.