As former CEO of Rumi Spice, Patti Doyle oversees the brand’s mission to bring ethically sourced and socially responsible spices from Afghanistan to customers while providing jobs to Afghan women who hand harvest the spices. Doyle, CEO of PD Consulting, will be presenting the session: How to Price Your Products, during The Basics: The Business of Specialty Food, taking place this Saturday as part of the Winter Fancy Food Show. She spoke with SFA’s Adrianna Pirone, marketing manager, social media, about the session during a recent Instagram Live. Following are excerpts from the interview:
Pirone: What are some of the main topics you’ll touch on during the session?
Doyle: We’ll go from soup to nuts, pardon the pun, of how to come up with a price for your product. This will be geared toward those who are new to the industry or pre-revenue or just concepting and we’ll talk about how to think about price and what you need to do to come up with a price that works for consumers, distributors, retailers, and yourself. You’ll have a chance to work on actual numbers. I’ve added a dynamic worksheet and we’ll literally go through the exercise of when I procured my first saffron to getting it to a shelf at Whole Foods, and discuss how I think about everything that impacts price.
Even if you’re mid-revenue and still doing farmers’ markets or just in one region it’s a great way to validate your pricing while you still have time to change it or if you're expanding to distributors like Faire or UNFI, it’s great to check your pricing.
Pirone: What’s the difference between pricing for a mission-based company vs. one that doesn’t have a mission like yours does?
Doyle: I want the best price possible that creates enough demand and helps me make money because those are the two things that will ultimately help me support our mission, right? So, if can double sales of saffron year-over-year that means that I can double the sales that I buy from my farm, so to me, it’s like thinking about doing it in the same way but using what you can create, differently.
Related: How to Raise Prices in Uncertain Times; SFA President Bill Lynch Discusses Winter Fancy Food Show.