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Growing a Fruit Snack Business for a Good Cause

19 points| patwalls | 7 years ago |starterstory.com

11 comments

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[+] gdhbcc|7 years ago|reply
30 employees and 15000 dollars of revenue per month?

500 dollars worth of revenue per employee per month? This is not a viable business.

[+] moorhosj|7 years ago|reply
Revenue grew from $8k to $150k in two years. You have no idea if this is a viable business, but the market seems to like it. They clearly in scaling mode:

==Peaceful Fruits is in the middle of a production expansion to 5x capacity so that we can hit breakeven levels and beyond.==

[+] phnofive|7 years ago|reply
I can’t help with the math, but there are several employees who are at least partially funded with grants.
[+] philipodonnell|7 years ago|reply
It used to be that this model was common for charity startups and I was sort of ok with that. Uninspired... but ok. Its a bit of wealth transfer capitalism-style, and at least then the profits do to go to help someone in need, maybe by donating back to the people with disabilities, or building infrastructure in the Amazon. But this is just nah we'll keep 100% of the profits ourselves instead! Innovation!

- Find a packaged product with raw material sourced from an "on-trend" country (founder's words), buy at market prices, claim to be "creating opportunities" there in a vague way.

- Find laborers subsidized by grants to do the packaging, use this to apply for your own grants. Enjoy "the incredible feel-good aspects of providing jobs" (founder's words) with subsidized labor costs. Also enjoying "effectively ... zero-interest loans" is a nice benefit as well. PROTIP - If you automate away those same workers once you have used them to bootstrap the business you can still use the pictures in your origin story PR pieces.

- Target "higher-income consumers with the values and means to vote with their dollars - whether that’s in support of high-quality food, progressive community development, or both." (founder's words) to avoid having to justify a premium-priced but ultimately commoditized product.

- Do a kickstarter, not because its necessary to get product validation, just because "the most concrete, useful lesson is definitely that nearly anyone has a $10,000 crowdfunding campaign in them."

[+] coin|7 years ago|reply
What's with the silly and dishonest non-GMO label? It doesn't bode well for the credibility of this product.