Food Academy Start Programme

Food Academy Start Programme is a new training programme aimed at supporting and nurturing start up food businesses. Bord Bia, SuperValu and the Local Enterprise Offices (LEO) have joined forces on this initiative to provide a food marketing programme to new and early-stage food business owners and Cork City and South Cork Local Enterprise Offices (LEO) are offering this programme to Cork based food businesses in September 2014.

Programme Format

The programme is a combination of workshops and mentoring, delivered by food marketing experts and is designed to guide companies from start-up to their first retail listing through the following:

• 6 x ½ day workshops
• One-to-one mentoring with trainers
• Opportunity to pitch to local SuperValu retail representative at the end of programme

The intensive workshops will provide companies with business support and knowledge including consumer insight, technical advice, resource planning, commercial advice and marketing development. The programme has a core commercial focus and all participants will have the opportunity to pitch their product or idea to a local SuperValu representative, with a view to securing an initial local listing.  

Workshop Content

The programme will offer 6 intensive ½ day workshops covering the following 3 areas:

1. Market Background and Understanding the Consumer

• Understanding Consumers
• Market BackgroundResearch & Data
• Marketing Strategy & Segmentation

2. Technical Issues

• Introduction to Finance
• Pricing
• New Product Development
• Food Safety & Food Labelling
• Packaging
• Managing Human Resources

 Growing Sales

• Branding and Pack Design
• Routes to Market
• Buyer Meetings
• Marketing Plans
• Promoting with Confidence
• Public Relations

The modules will be interactive and practically based and case-studies and guest speakers will be introduced for some topics. Participants will be prepared for buyer meetings by role-play of meetings to gain feedback from the group and trainer. This will prepare participants for real-life buyer meetings and will be put in to practice at the end of the programme where participants will have the opportunity to pitch to a local SuperValu retail representative.

Mentoring Supports

Each participant will be able to avail of up to 3 x 3-hour mentoring sessions over the course of the programme to address specific issues one-to-one.