Translated material
Recipe designer: Russian startup for cooks and suppliers
The posters of events at the weekend in Moscow and St. Petersburg have not been dispensed with food markets for a long time, and the number of new food projects, even despite the crisis, is growing. Mini-feces, phalafel and conceptual coffee houses appear every week. Technical work - delivery, search for visitors, automation of orders - for them are made by other companies, which are also many. But finding quality products to culinary specialists is difficult. This is not the simplest in Russian realities the task is trying to take on the St. Petersburg company Ingredients.pro - a platform connecting those who make food with those who produce ingredients. According to professionals, the startup falls into the pain point and does something that everyone missed.
Marketers go to startup
The founder of Ingredients.pro is Roman Kalinin, the head of the Vatel Marketing marketing agency, which helped food manufacturers with assortment, marketing and sales. He opened this business in 2013 with partners, like himself, former directors for marketing of large food plants.
Among the services of the agency was the development of an assortment plan-a list of products with all the properties that were supposed to appear in the line for two to three years. But customers often complained that it is impossible to fulfill the recommendations “Vatel Marketing” with their technologies and ingredients. Then Kalinin and his colleagues introduced the technologists to the suppliers, transmitted contacts, organized tastings. Then the techno themselves communicated with the wholesalers and, after the trial parties, from several of them chose one-more or less permanent. But since the technology did not know the technology of the ingredients, by the end of 2012, Kalinin made an “encyclopedia” - he collected all the ingredients for baking bread to the site, added the proposals of three suppliers and sent out links to technologists so as not to retell the same dozens of times. Without such work, assortment plans developed by Vatel Marketing would go to the table.
Kalinin would have considered the catalog as a help for the main business, but once one of the suppliers asked him to lay out a list of ingredients from the base on his website. And he was even ready to pay a little for working with the catalog every month.
“Any businessman in such a situation as a good cop makes a rack - trying to figure out what is the demand and how to make money,” says Kalinin. A few months later, a friend thought of him to find the money of venture investors under a new idea. So Kalinin realized that now he is making a startup.
How does this work
The selection of the ingredients of technology is carried out only after testing the product in production. Therefore, the task of Kalinin was to simplify the choice and selection of samples. The easiest way to do this is on the portal with filters, a simple search for ingredients by type of product, type of ingredient and manufacturer, and then order a probe from the supplier in one click. This could not be done in any online catalog of wholesalers or on the board of ads in Runet-everywhere the technologist would call, write, discussed the details for many days, or even months.
The supplier, in turn, through Ingredients.pro receives direct orders for samples, and this is better than any advertising. The first version of Ingredients.pro appeared in February 2015 in the form of Inbake, for bakers and confectioners, because it was with them that Vatel Marketing worked the most. Now there are more than 40 suppliers, 950 types of ingredients and about 1.7 thousand technologists from cities throughout Russia, from Kazakhstan and Belarus.
Having chosen the ingredients, you indicate the volume of the test batch, the deadlines - and wait for the parcel.
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