Food business is good business

Posted by Felix Okoli on Friday June 15, 2012 16:10:29:

If you can cook food, you can make money in Nigeria. If you can manage people who cook food, you can also make money. If you can sell already cooked food, you can also make money. Food business has never been as profitable as it is now in Nigeria, but who is willing to invest?

With the largest booming population in Africa and having had relative peace for over 40 years, there is no better time than now to invest in the food sector. Everyone who can provide food can make it big in Nigeria or at least make a profit right from the low scale akara woman to the fast food chains, if you can cook it, there will come.

Nigerians love food and they are more than willing to pay even if it was their last money, for most Nigerians, food comes first. Being a labour intensive economy, most people here spend more money on food than they do on other things.

But food business is not an easy business because it involves quite some stress both for the small time and big time providers. It takes a lot of time, training, managing, packaging and distributing this product. Cooking food is the hardest part of having a food business because that is where controls are meant to be more strict. If the cooking process is not well monitored, it could leave a bad reputation for your and would drive away your customers, so quality comes first.

There is no limit to the amount of money you can make from selling food as both small and big men are into it. Even if it is just selling breakfast or tea, there is money in it.

Things you need to consider when getting into this business
- How much capital do you already have?
- Would you employ staff
- Do you have a place such as shop or store?
- What range of foods do you want to sell?
- How do you deal with storage?
- What are your control measures for maintaining quality?
- What is your basic price
- What category of people are your major customers?
- How long do you want to run the business?
- How much returns do you want?
- How do you source for raw materials and labour?

Some Costs associated with running a food business
- Rent
- Raw materials for cooking
- Labour
- VAT

Small scale large scale food vending all sell
It doesn't really matter how much capital or how small you might want to start, you can make money from all that There are places a plate of food sells for at least N100 and some other places where that same place of food sells for N500. The difference is probably because of the name, location, environment and quality of service. SO before you start doing the business, you need to consider the level of service your potential customers are likely to prefer. Some people prefer to pay more so that you only give them fresh food while others don't mind. Ordinarily one would be offended if he goes to a big fast food restaurant and yet doesn't get fresh food even when he's paying more. I've experienced that before and don't want to go back to that restaurant.