Erik never knew if his home business idea would generate just a little bit of extra cash … or hit the big time!
From Startups.co.uk
For most budding entrepreneurs, the ingredients of success are things such as cash flow, market position and effective staff. For husband and wife team Eric and Jeanette Watkins, it’s vital that more literal ingredients are right, as they attempt to take the UK cake industry by storm.
The couple’s firm, Fresh Eric’s Cake Company Ltd., was named the Micro Business of the Year at the recent Startups Awards, and it’s easy to see why. Despite having a young family and minimal funds, the couple have overseen an explosion of interest in their tasty treats since the creation of the business in late 2003.
Eric and Jeanette felt that the main suppliers were serving the UK public up mass produced, additive-packed cakes. The duo believed that a focus on fresh ingredients, strong flavours and moistness would enable them to take a slice (no pun intended) out of the UK’s £1.2 billion cake market.
“My wife ran restaurants in the USA for about 10 years,? Eric recalls. “In terms of cakes, they have something quite different over there. The recipes are richer and moister.
“We had a ‘I think we can do better than this’ moment in our local coffee shop one day. What spurred us on was that there were voluntary redundancies on offer at the company I was working for and we had a baby. We wanted to do something that involved the family.?
The couple’s first step was to try out recipes on friends and family, based on versions of classic cake flavours – chocolate, carrot, lemon and apple and spice. The feedback from these tests convinced Eric and Jeanette to take the plunge.
“We had a team of tester who all got lots of cakes to try over the course of a couple of months,? Eric explains. “The gave the best ones to a local café on the high street – that was basically our test marketing. We then did some cold calling. The response was so good that we knew it was something we could take further.
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