Top 5 tips for ingredient companies

In the highly competitive ingredients market, how can you ensure success? RTS Director, Jamie Rice, offers five proven tips to growing your business.

1. Know your market

As an ingredient company, do you know the size of your market? Are you actively increasing your share or simply growing with the market?

In my experience of working with ingredient companies across the global marketplace, I've found that understanding your market is essential not only to see where your company currently fits into it but also where you want to be.

If you know your market, you can then understand exactly where you need to focus, which in turn will enable you to see new opportunities, increase sales team performance and bring clarity to your business planning.

Knowing your market will enable you to monitor the progress of company objectives and financial targets. You can determine if your strategy will deliver what you are looking to achieve and if not explore new opportunities for both organic and external growth.

2. See the complete picture

Is all information useful?  As a company you are probably bombarded with information, but if you can't apply it to your specific needs then all this data does is cloud the issues that really matter.

We have found that by measuring total food consumption you can see opportunities outside of existing markets and break down sales by volumes in different channels, including industrial ingredients and foodservice. This will allow you to quickly build up a complete picture of the opportunities available to you.

I am constantly receiving marketing information, news updates and promotions full of information. The key is to carefully evaluate the most valuable, consistently reliable sources. This may mean cutting or back on some services and finding one or two trusted suppliers who can save valuable time and money and give you the information you really need.

3. Add value through trends

Trends aren't just clever marketing terms in the global food and ingredients industry today: they are fast becoming the key driving force of growth. So it is crucial to keep abreast of this ever-changing area in order to stay ahead of your competition.

The industrial food and drink market is growing slowly at rate of 2.4% per year while trends such as ethical, organic and convenience are delivering growth rates of up to 14% per year. This therefore represents a massive opportunity to add value. The message is clear: unless you're supplying products aimed at these trends, you will be left behind in declining markets that are under increasing price pressure.

4. Look beyond brand share

In today's global food and drink industry, brand share is now irrelevant when it comes to understanding the ingredients market.

With so many major brands outsourcing production, the critical consideration today is identifying where this production takes place.

A large part of my work at RTS is now focused on helping companies to identify production sites and calculate ingredient volumes used by each site. Our clients have found this extremely useful in discovering where the real supply opportunities are. 

5. Be ahead of your customers

As an ingredient supplier, it is no longer simply enough to turn up and present your latest ingredients.

In fact, it's often expected that you are ahead of the game, providing your customers the latest information regarding markets, cutting edge technology, packaging, trends and 'the story' behind your new products.

RTS can help you to do this by taking time to find out how you define your business, products and market in order to provide you with information that is specifically tailored to your company. We have worked with ingredient companies across the industry, from flavours and colours suppliers to hydrocolloids and industrial ingredients manufacturers. When it comes to providing market information, we believe it should always be a case of what you need, never what we've got.

To see how RTS can help grow your business, call Jamie on +44(0) 1902 422282 or contact us

And, if you are a subscriber to our newsletter, the initial consultations and proposal are free of charge.

4. Look beyond brand share

In today's global food and drink industry, brand share is now irrelevant when it comes to understanding the ingredients market.

With so many major brands outsourcing production, the critical consideration today is identifying where this production takes place.

A large part of my work at RTS is now focused on helping companies to identify production sites and calculate ingredient volumes used by each site. We can even supply contact information for these producers so that your sales team knows who to call.

5. Be ahead of your customers

As an ingredient supplier, it is no longer simply enough to turn up and present your latest ingredients.

In fact, it's often expected that you are ahead of the game, providing your customers the latest information regarding markets, trends and 'the story' behind your new products.

At RTS we not only supply this information, but we can also put together the presentation for you.

To see how RTS can help grow your business, call Jamie on +44(0) 1902 422282 or contact us