Meggen Wilson lives in Whitefish, MT and sells vanilla products and apple cider vinegar with her food business, Pine & Palm Kitchen.

Meggen only started her cottage food business a year and a half ago, but it has already taken many turns and is growing rapidly.

She initially sold at local markets using both Montana’s food freedom law and cottage food law, but last year, she transitioned into a commercial kitchen to sell online and ship nationwide.

In this episode, she covers tons of business topics, including branding, packaging, licensing, trademarking, organic labeling, sourcing, copacking, ecommerce, SEO, email marketing, and more!

What You’ll Learn

• What you should NOT do at farmers markets and local events
• About free resources in your local community that you should be taking advantage of
• Why it was important for Meggen to invest in a strong brand from the start
• Whether you should consider trademarking your brand assets
• The legalities for moving to a commercial manufacturing license
• Tips for finding a commercial kitchen to rent
• How to create a HACCP plan, and when it’s necessary
• The issues involved with selling extracts and whether you need a liquor license
• How to research your products in advance to prove market demand
• SEO strategies for getting your website to appear in search results
• The logistical challenges involved with products that require a long processing time
• The challenges with co-packing and how to know if it would work well for your products
• What data you should be collecting from customers at markets, and what to do with it
• How to use an email newsletter to engage with your customers
• How to use a food blog to support your cottage food business
• Tips on getting social media ads to work for your business

Resources

Pine & Palm Kitchen website (Instagram | Facebook | Pinterest | Bluesky)

How to Launch a Craft Food Business From Scratch

KeySearch (SEO tool)

Episode 98 with Stephanie Wiley

Montana Cottage Food Law

Free Tutorial: Intro To Email Marketing

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Are you building an email list for your business yet? If not, you really should be collecting customers’ email addresses and emailing them on a regular basis. Even these days, email continues to be better than social media for generating consistent sales, and the best part is that you own it. Once you build an email list, nobody can take it away from you.

I created this free tutorial that will walk you through the essentials of using Kit to build an email list and get more followers!

Get full show notes and transcript here: https://forrager.com/podcast/134