Thought to Fork Services

We can guide and advise your food and drink businesses on translating concepts into tangible products, avoiding roadblocks in your development journey, building operational capacity and capability, and optimising your product offers for target markets.

What can we help you with?

With our extensive expertise in many areas, we offer a wide variety of services. The main elements of our services are tailored or standard workshops in which we help you navigate through the ‘Thought to Fork’ process, among other things.

Workshops & Training

How Many Beans? Supports developing businesses and academic institutions from ‘Thought to Fork’ through standard or tailored group workshops to suit your needs. If you are looking to develop your business or host a workshop through an academic institution, we can work with you to put together a workshop ranging from a half day to three days, covering the ‘Thought to Fork’ process. We also offer other subject specific workshops such as product safety and recipe development. 

Thought to Fork

The Thought to Fork concept allows us to help you at every stage of your food business journey.   

Services

Through the ‘Thought to Fork’ stages, these are all the ways we can help.

Concept

Getting the concept right is the keystone to success. We can help you to identify and robustly test:-

  • What consumer problem are you solving?
  • How your product is different from the competition?
  • What is your brand positioning?
  • Success with “Me too” products is difficult but “Me Three+”  is almost impossible.

Design

To translate a concept into a viable product design, requires expertise. Our experience is invaluable for:

  • Logically developing commercially viable recipes
  • Designing in food safety controls
  • Ensuring Legal and Regulatory compliance
  • Shelf Life Measurement and Optimisation

Processing

Successfully executing a Product Design in to a Processing environment involves many challenges we have beaten before.

  • Ensuring product consistent performance
  • Continued food safety control
  • Optimising production efficiency at scale
  • Make or Buy options
  • Cost Effective Production

Scale Up

Product behaviour in a kitchen environment often changes when volumes and batch sizes increase. Our expertise in a factory environment ensures that:

  • Product characteristics and controls are retained 
  • Process change options are understood
  • Operating processes and costs are optimised
  • Supply chains are robust

Commercialisation

We can work with you to get your product to market by:

  • Developing a business case for a profitable business not an expensive hobby
  • Ensuring your Product and your Business are Supermarket Ready
  • Devising a low cost marketing programme to build your brand profile
  • Proposing a “Go to Market” Strategy

Launch

When everything is in place we can make a list , and  check it twice to provide the best chance for your success:

  •  “Pressure test” your product against the original concept and target market
  • Ensure a launch plan is in place
  • Monitor product performance from day one
Ensuring success

Method of Delivery

We can deliver most of our services through different methods, geared towards what suits you best, keeping all of us Covid secure.

One-to-One Support

We offer support on a one-to-one consulting basis from any of our four partners whose skills are matched to your needs.

Workshops and Training

One of the best ways to get started is to join us at a workshop and we will be able to help you with all of the services outlined above and more!

On-location Support

We are also able to offer hands on support on location, whether that’s your kitchen, pilot plant or factory.