Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford

Send us Fan Mail From unlocking funds through grants, and winning awards can both be a game-changer for your business. In this week’s episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford, I chat with Madonna Melrose, founder of Melrose International, about leveraging grants to fuel your growth. Madonna, a specialist in grant applications, shares how understanding the grant landscape and having a clear future...

Send us Fan Mail From tech exec to meal kit mogul, Ambika Malvia's journey is nothing short of inspiring. In this week’s episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford, I chat with the amazing Ambika, co-founder of Spicecraft meal kits. Starting from a humble market stall in Sydney, Ambika and her partner, Vikram, have scaled their business to over 430 retailers across Australia. Ambika’s unique ap...

Send us Fan Mail From legal aspirations, to drama school, to brand owner and specialty distribution, it’s been an interesting (to say the least!) pathway to the F&B industry for my latest guest on Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast. This week I chat with the incredible Melinda Dimitriades-Catt. As a professional cook, small goods and cheese expert, and speciality food distributor based in S...

Send us Fan Mail “Can you share advice for getting in contact with buyers” is a question I’m asked often. Brand owners can sometimes be afraid to make the approach. It’s understandable, buyers can be pretty elusive and appear on the horizon like demigods with divine powers to consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand owners. But, the truth is, they’re human too. Just like you and I. There are so many wa...

Send us Fan Mail Scaling a consumer packaged goods (CPG) business is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. There are so many options on how you can go-to-market and they all look shiny, delicious and different. But, what are the real opportunities? And the real pitfalls? There are more than 20,000 new food and drink products launched every year and the go-to-market str...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you’re not from the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, you’ve managed to bag $1M dollars in investment (I know right!) and you want to scale a big food business? You move to the other side of the world and participate in an accelerator program, lean heavily into everything you can learn and source as many contacts you can to grow your business fast and go on...

Send us Fan Mail Buyers inside the Pitch Hub at Foodpreneurs Festival told me what brands and products they really loved and wanted to see more of.  Would you like to know what they told me? How handy would it be for you to understand why some brands were chosen, by the buyers, to pitch and others weren’t? Now you can.  In this episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast, I invited Brent Vrdo...

Send us Fan Mail According to Warren Spence, founder Motor, a brand design agency and my guest in this episode, the modern world is as fast as a Japanese bullet train and our generation is fixated on digital media content. Let’s just say, according to Warren, that visual communication is a little out of control, mainly because of social media but it will only get faster. Supermarkets, pharmacies a...

Send us Fan Mail Want to know all the steps to develop a food or drink packaged product for commercial scale? Want to bring a product from overseas and launch it in your local market? How about trying to get ahead of the food trends and launch a product before anyone else does? All these questions and more are answered in this episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast where I chat to food s...

Send us Fan Mail Are you scaling your food, drink or pet treat brand and have taken time to think about how to get stocked into all the stores you’ve successfully landed? What about how much it’s costing you to store inventory rather than landing it on the retail shelf? Or how much each carton is costing you to deliver so you can work out what your precise CLOGS are? You quite possibly haven’t!!!...

Send us Fan Mail What should your sales script be when you get a ‘no, yes, or maybe’ response from a buyer?   In this episode I speak with sales superstar, Mia Van Tubbergh from Elm Professional, and she tells you.   For each reply, Mia says, there’s a response that you can have prepared, even if you’re not sure what they’re going to say, because sales is a predictable cycle. A Foodpreneur just ne...

Send us Fan Mail Getting product off the shelf and into more consumers’ baskets requires knowledge of what your consumer responds to, and what turns them off. Finding that out can be hard.    In this episode I speak with Sally Breden, Managing Director of The VGood Company, a busy working mum with brand management and product development expertise who launched VGood pea-not spreads to bring to lif...

Send us Fan Mail Do you know you can get money back in your pocket for all your hard work crafting delicious new products, experimenting with exciting ingredients, or streamlining your production process?   All those research and development (R&D) efforts could translate into government funding. It's like getting paid to create!   In this episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast,...

Send us Fan Mail The first 90 days after your product lands on the supermarket shelf are crucial to your long-term ability to keep it there. Setting up your rate of sale to continually improve will avoid the risk of your product being delisted. One of the fundamentals of getting this right is by ensuring your first promotional plan doesn’t sit outside of what else you’re doing. In fact it should c...

Send us Fan Mail Many food and drink founders dream of landing their product on the shelves of the major supermarkets. But why do they make it so hard for Foodpreneurs to do so? In this episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast, I chat with Allen Roberts, a former FMCG senior executive with food giants like Vegetable Oils which became Goodman Fielder, Cerebos the makers of Fountain Tomato S...

Send us Fan Mail You might be a small business but that doesn’t mean you have to spend more than you earn. There might be a constant list of activities on your ‘to do list’, all seemingly urgent to keep your business afloat, but what are the things that are the most important that will put more money in your pocket, and not more money in the pockets of retailers or distributors? In this 100th epis...

Send us Fan Mail Many food and drink founders dream of taking their brand global. But where do you start, what does it take and what are the challenges that come with expanding into international markets? In this episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast, I chat with Kathryn Bricken, founder of Doughlicious - the London Dough Company. Kathryn shares the secrets behind scaling her cookie dou...

Send us Fan Mail Many small packaged food and drink businesses see PR as complex, ill-defined, or expensive. But what if it could be simple, affordable, and highly effective? In this 2nd Anniversary episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast, I explore the power of PR for Foodpreneurs. Join me as I chat with PR expert Celia Harding, who's worked with both major brands including Smirnoff...

Send us Fan Mail The world's top business leaders know the secret ingredient for scaling success: people. Not just employees, but a powerful network of mentors, allies, and even family. In these turbulent times, going it alone limits your growth potential. That's why in this 2nd Anniversary episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast,  Episode 97: Behind the Scenes Look of what it A...

Send us Fan Mail Forget the fantasy of buyers begging for your product. In the real world of packaged food and drink, thousands of brands are vying for limited shelf space. To stand out and get noticed, you need a strategic game plan. In this 2nd Anniversary episode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford, I talk with RangeMe founder, Nicky Jackson, the queen of connecting suppliers with retailers. Nicki...

Send us Fan Mail Picture this, you’ve just launched a food brand with no FMCG experience, producing in a saturated market from your garage in a local town. Fast forward four years, and that brand is now a household name, generating millions in revenue, selling nationally and internationally, and self-manufacturing not only your product but others as well. It may sound like a dream, but it's t...

Send us Fan Mail In the competitive world of packaged food and drink, your brand and packaging are your megaphone, your spotlight, your key to conquering the aisles, landing on more shelves and building loyal customers. In this 2nd Anniversary epsiode of Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast, I chat with with design experts Bex Deere and Nat Townsend from Griffin Grace. They've helped countle...

Send us Fan Mail Knowing what trends are happening in your industry is a smart way to find out how to not just stay on top of what’s happening, but ahead of it; differentiating yourself from a lot of the competition while doing so. Brands that don’t evolve, get left behind. It’s not about jumping on every new trend that comes along or creating a new product to meet every consumer’s demand. It’s ab...

Send us Fan Mail 2023 was for many, a shock to the system. A steep change in consumer behaviour relative to previous years. We heard ‘cost of living crisis’ mentioned continually on the news. But was it all bad for emerging food and drink consumer packaged good brands?  Absolutely not.  In this week’s Foodpreneur with Chelsea Ford podcast episode, the final for 2023, I review what the landscape wa...

Send us Fan Mail Navigating social media as a brand owner is like wielding a double-edged sword. Master it, and you're on the path to becoming a household name, raking in sales through heightened social awareness. Misstep and you might find yourself pouring heaps of time into creating content that goes unnoticed or fails to captivate. Add the ever-evolving landscape of multiple platforms to t...