- MASTERCLASS
How LoveSeitan scaled up.
with Steve Swindon, founder LoveSeitan
LoveSeitan launched in 2017 as an idea to start a vegan food truck after a weekend at Vegan Camp Out. However, they quickly realised that they could supply a much bigger market if they focused on launching their own range of products rather than serving individual meals. Several years later, LoveSeitan provides both the general public and food manufacturers across the country with meat-replacement seitan, including supplying the vegan pepperoni for supermarket own-brand pizzas. They also picked up a high-profile investor in Heather Mills and moved their production to her VBites vegan production facilities. Steve tells us how they scaled up so fast.
In this session:
- What is seitan and how can it be used?
- How Steve and Nick picked making seitan as their business idea after a weekend at Vegan Camp Out in 2017.
- How LoveSeitan used vegan markets and tradeshows to test their idea and get customer feedback.
- How Steve tested out early pricing strategies and bundles at live shows and events.
- Why it’s better to give out stock for free as samples rather than waste it.
- How LoveSeitan got into the food services market (restaurants and other food manufacturers) almost by accident after being approached by a restaurant at a show.
- How LoveSeitan used SEO to make sure they got found when companies were looking for seitan manufacturers.
- Supplying manufacturers with your product as an ingredient is a journey you have to be willing to go on (providing constant samples and agreeing to recipe changes) but the rewards, if you get it right, can be huge.
- How selling to manufacturers can give you big volumes and repeat orders.
- Getting listed with a wholesaler to resell your product is only 10% of the process. You need to provide the pull-through or you will get de-listed, they do not market your product for you.
- Wholesalers take 30-40% + margins, so you need to bake in bigger margins into your pricing strategy early on to cover both wholesaler’s margins and promotions. If you are only adding 10% to your costs then you will never be able to supply wholesalers.
- How you can invest in wholesaler’s dedicated events and brochures to promote your listing.
- How getting their product introduced to a supermarket buying group landed them a contract as the vegan pepperoni supplier for own-brand vegan pizzas.
- When you take a product that you are making at home and start to produce it commercially, you are not going to end up with the same product.
- Why a lot of food products won’t translate easily into being made in bulk.
- Retailers have a lot of technical requirements that can be expensive to overcome and will require external expert expertise.
- If you are planning to create a large food business, then you need to start out with that mindset and build a business and product that is retail-ready.
- How LoveSeitan attracted vegan investor Heather Mills to invest in the company, by being visible at shows and offering samples.
- Why the biggest turning point was moving away from manufacturing the product themselves.
- If you plan to sell into bigger retailers and wholesalers, your product needs to be manufactured in a BRC-certified factory or they will not deal with you. You cannot get BRC certification in a domestic kitchen.
- How new product development, once you are commercially manufacturing, takes on a whole new level of complexity.
- Why just hiring staff and increasing capacity does not equal scaling up. You need to scale the business faster than the costs.
- Why investors are looking for companies that have already proven an idea and gone through the early pain themselves.
- Why bringing in an investor brings extra accountability into your business, but also extra access and expertise. You shouldn’t look for an investor, you should look for someone who is also going to be a business partner who is going to help you grow.
- If you are thinking about investment then a core part of your plan should be articulating the relationship between investment and return – not just a return in money but a return in scale.
- Why LoveSeitan’s consumers are still predominately vegan, but they are currently looking at their messaging and branding to take seitan into the mainstream.
- How building a consumer brand can create extra pull-through for your business-to-business customers also.
- Why you need to be able to show an unfamiliar customer what to do with your product. For example, packaging it as ‘straight-to-wok’ or chopping it up into strips or nuggets.
- You can only ask a consumer to make one behavioural change at a time – ‘people know what to do with burgers and sausages!’
- Steve’s final tips for scaling up a vegan food business: 1. Get your product out into the public as soon as possible; 2. get professional advice (there are grants available); 3. find an investor who is aligned with your ethics and you feel comfortable working with.
