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Angel investor for expansion of existing succesful gourmet granola bar business!
Posted by: Cassandra Paquin on 9/1/2008 5:15:19 PM
Funding Needed:
$100k - $250k 		Category:
Manufacturing & Production 		Website :
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Location :
Statesville, North Carolina, USA 		Viewed : 222 times
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Description:
This is a second post as first post did not go through:

We are a family-owned, established gourmet granola and granola bar business looking to take the next step with our product. We are located in rural NC, but market to major gourmet grocers in the Charlotte market. We have been in business for 4-1/2 years and have strong wholesale clients such as the entire Home Economist chain of Charlotte, Dean and DeLuca of Charlotte, Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa, Fresh Market of Charlotte, and most of the local Dilworth Coffee chain locally. You may review a short article on our bakery in the April 2008 issue of the esteemed Charlotte Magazine.

Currently we have several opportunities to step up as follows:

1. Fresh Market gourmet stores will work to move us into most of the stores in the East if we improve our current lip-and-tape packaging and labeling system to custom-printed and heat-sealed complete with bar coding and nutrition facts, as well as custom wooden display units which would be crafted by K-D Displays of Maine.

2. Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa of Asheville has offered our granola on their exclusive Club Floor complimentary breakfast line for more than 3 years. They have recently opened several high-end shops on their concourse to include a NC-specific gourmet shop, a coffee shop, and a Christmas goods shop and they have invited us to be included in these shops. This would require purchasing raw goods on a slightly higher mass weight as well as investing in the same displays as mentioned in number 1.

3. We have an extended offer from Whole Foods corporate that has been standing in wait for us to improve our packaging and labeling as mentioned in number 1 and they would put us in all of their stores on the East coast as well as Great Britain, on a graduated basis.

4. Both items 1 and 3 would require the addition of paid bakery staff and upgrade to a larger facility from our current, as we are currently classified as an inspected "home" bakery, though we have far outgrown that status long ago. We also would be interested in purchasing our raw goods at the aforementioned higher mass (pallets verses 4-5 bags as current, etc) but would need to be in a larger facility with proper storage for these materials.

My husband is an architect with a major firm in Charlotte on a commercial basis and several of the brothers in our Mennonite Church are builders and would be willing to help us with the work of upgrading a space to suit our needs when the funding becomes available.

I, personally, have attended culinary school in Charlotte and have run the business since it's inception as a hobby several years ago. We have the heada of the culinary program from that school as a strong supporter who believes in the product and is available to us as an informal professional advisor as needed. We also have a business advisor from a SCORE-related program in Charlotte who has directed us and helped us to learn many things as we've streamlined business for the past several months.
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