Your twelve weeks of discovery will include: 

Focused on assessing the feasibility of your food business, these two half-day sessions will help you understand:

• Will it sell? Assess the features, benefits and experience of your product
• What does the competition look like? Who are they, what do they offer, what makes you different?
• Who is my Customer? What do they want, fear and need? Create a positioning statement.
• What goals should I be setting? What goals should I set to plan for success
• Can I make Money? What financial information do I need to know?
• How long will it take? How long before I make money? How long before I hire an employee? How quickly can I ramp up production?

Get tools, mentoring and peer feedback to help as you roll up your sleeves and develop strategic components for your food business.

Get ready to take your food product development from the home kitchen to our food factory with this introduction to safe, small scale food manufacturing.

In this full day session, participants will learn about:

• Good Manufacturing Processes
• Pre-production systems
• Safe equipment handling basics

The first half of the day is spent in the seminar room, learning about GMP’s, SOP’s and other important professional production terms and systems. Then, the second half of the session takes students into the plant where they will be able to see first-hand how the equipment works and get a chance to try it out themselves. Leave with an understanding of the names and features of specialized small scale food processing equipment, and how it can be used to make food products safely and efficiently.

This 3 hour session will discuss areas in basic food science and the history of food evolving from culinary techniques and the evolution of food processing; ingredient usage fundamentals of kitchen batches to scaling up; introduction to product development process and discussions of case studies; formulating prototypes from concept recipes; formulation costing spreadsheets; basic regulatory knowledge for labeling and discussion of consumer research.

This course provides food processing industry sanitation workers – more specifically, those who perform or will be performing sanitation in your plant, with essential general background knowledge related to:

• The principles of cleaning and sanitation
• Common food industry practices
• Detailed instruction on the facility-specific cleaning and sanitizing procedures. 

Present your recipe to a Professional Product Developer and get his/her feedback on your concept. This 45 minute face-to-face meeting is your time to get the scientific and business opinion of an expert product developer so bring product samples and prepared questions to this session.

A short written report will be provided with specific recommendations, watch points and tips from the product developer.

This two part workshop will help you to synthesize the insights gleaned in earlier modules into a comprehensive business plan that can be used not just to grow your food business but to communicate your concept to banks, employees, partners and investors.

Competitive analysis, consumer insights and costing exercises created in earlier workshops will be essential tools used to finalize this strategic document.

This seminar will show Canadian food startup companies how to:

• Sell directly to the consumer at Farmers’ Markets, Food Shows and Festivals
• What companies are successful at farmers’ markets and how they do it
• How to choose and apply to the markets, food shows and festivals
• Use the farmers’ market for testing of new product concepts and other market research

Through discussion of real-world examples and trends, this workshop will help you learn:

• What makes a package design stand out in a crowded marketplace
• How to create consumer demand
• How to develop a brand voice that fits your product and target demographic

Clients may bring in their current packaging or packaging they admire for Group discussion.

The workshop includes time to write a creative brief that will allow you to work effectively with a designer and confidently bring your product to market!

Find the schedule of cohort 8 that begins on September 12, 2018. 

In partnership with George Brown College (GBC FIRSt & start GBC), the MFBC will take place at GBC Waterfront Campus – 51 Dockside Drive, Room 418. It’s a beautiful space with full digital equipment.

By TTC

Subway Line 1 (Yonge-University-Spadina) 

• Take # 6 Bay bus from Union station to Dockside Drive; bus stops in front of the college

Subway Line 2 (Bloor-Danforth)

• Take # 75 Sherbourne bus from Sherbourne station to the Queens Quay East stop
• Take #72B Pape bus from Pape station to the Queens Quay East stop

By car – paid parking available on site

• Underground garage beneath the  campus building
• Lot in front of the campus building
• Across the street from the campus building on north side of Queen’s Quay
• Loblaws at Lower Jarvis and Queen’s Quay