Having now set up our retail shop and getting it running smoothly it is now time to diversify and investigate new markets.
Unfortunately in our position we are surrounded with coffee shops so we are not allowed to sell hot coffee so we need to think outside the box.
We did quite a bit of research and found a growing trend in Cold Pressed coffee with all natural ingredients. In the US it has become very popular and is a premium product that goes great with donuts.
Diversifying
We ended up sourcing a company called Black Star because it was ticked all the boxes and had four flavours. Black, lite, creamy milk plus soy.
Research
The next was to see what other drinks we could source so I got the staff to do a survey of all the people who came to the shop. We found 75% were families with children or grandparents with grand children.
What would they like. and the answer was milkshakes. As we are doing boutique donuts the obvious thing is to do boutique milkshakes.
Conclusion
So now our shop has a range of drinks to compliment our donuts and in some cases we get completely new business.
Some people just come in to buy the cold pressed coffee and some for the milkshakes. Obviously they all cross pollinate.
Sometimes with franchises you are limited to what you can offer outside of the franchise so then it becomes much more about marketing which we will talk about next.