Alex and I went to the streets today to market and sell our tripe. Alex was running late and i was getting stressed, as he coudlnt find the containers for the day. at about 10.30am he arrived in his dads bakkie and we went down the road, parked in a loading zone, lit up the gas and started to sell within minutes. There is so doubt about the demand for the product and generally all the recipes were very well liked. We had curry ( needed a bit more and needed more seasoning), chilli tomato ( the most popular), onion and ginger and coriander. The people liked all the flavours and most people said they would buy again. There were so many lessons today...
1. The lids need to be on all the time
2. People use other words for tripe like pens ( stomach) and offal when marketing
3. The bowls we used need lids ( as many people like to eat at their desks)
4. We need to have salt sachets as well as spicy sauces
5. People also like home made steam bread and pap ( as tripe has plenty of gravy)
6. Tripe needs to be watched carefully in terms of its sell-by date/ this makes it a daily fresh product
7. The warmers need to be simple and without gas which is expensive
8. the cleaned tripe we bought from the supplier was frozen and was less than the weight we bought it for
with all these learnings the next steps are:
1. franchise financing
2. Costing of the whole model in detail
3. Logistics in more detail
4. a cooking facility for daily tripe
5. The detailed booklet for the tripe business
The business model will be to sell the franchises for around R50,000 and these franchises are trained to follow the tripe model. they will purchase the cooked tripe from us on a daily basis with our recipes only.
The food business is a tough business. The detail is so intense that any little mistake can lead to disaster. However there was a real demand for this product and we sold 70 servings in 2 hours. There is money to be made here and plenty of jobs created as well as opportunities for young black entrepreneurs. There is also a huge amount of work to be done as well.
I have some picture of the portable cooking stations mounted on tricycles that are so common here in China (I arrived on Sunday) which I will send you later today if you are still interested in the bicycle option to distribute the tripe. I bought my breakfast today from one mounted on an electric trike outside my home. Only R3 for a large pancake with an egg and vegitables in it, a full breakfast.
ReplyDeleteFor a cheap alternative to gas I can only suggest compressed coal blocks with ventalation holes through the center. Thats what they use here in China and the peope who run those bicycle mounted streetfood units manage them on very thin margins so I suspect there is no more cost effective method. I am sure that I have seen them for sale in South Africa.
Thats my sugestion.