Starting a Part-time Food Business: Everything You Need to Know to Turn Your Love for Food Into a Successful Business Without Necessarily Quitting Your Day Job

I bought this book for my son who is an executive with a very lucrative salary, but whose heart is in the kitchen. He caters small parties at present and has had rave reviews of his food and many referrals. He especially wanted to know the basics of cost-analysis and pricing-out his food per person. This book, so he tells me, has been extremely helpful to him in this particular regard as well as informative across-the-board. His confidence in pricing his catering has risen exponentially for, while he's always happy cooking for these soirees, he feels he's now being adequately paid for his services. This book absolutely helped him to achieve his new-found confidence in pricing and has made him even happier to profit properly from his culinary labours of love. Buy with confidence.

With insightful guidance and practical step-by-step directions, this is really the perfect recipe for starting your own food-related business! Jennifer Lewis has created a great guidebook for how to think through starting your own business, and then follow through into making that business a reality. The real-life business cases make this book a true gem, as you get a real sense of the hard work and passion necessary for success! I definitely recommend this book for all - whether you are toying with an idea or ready to truly start-up- this provides the right direction to get you going! I think when you are done, you will say, like I did, "I can do this!"

This book provided a lot of information to ponder. I was, maybe still am, thinking of starting a cookie business. This book gave me a lot to think about (and still am). The book also showed me what I had did not have a clue about!

This book really opened up my mind to the many possibilities to making money with my passion for cooking. The book is very realistic about starting a food business and how to go about it.

I've read a number of books on running a food business and starting a bakery, but this is the only book I've encountered that validated my need to keep working while starting this business and generated a game plan to do both. I rewrote the complicated business plan I was trying to put in place with a reduced, direct plan based on the template provided here. Jennifer, THANK YOU! You've made me feel like my dream, even if only part-time for now, is achievable.

Although I could definitely enjoy the parts about other every day people , The business parts although clear, weren't as helpful as I'd hoped. Haven't even wanted to finish it.

If you are someone who appreciates a properly written book with commas and correct word usage, then this book is not for you. Coming from a seemingly educated author who has a master's degree, one would expect this writer to be much more skilled at writing. This book is literally written at what seems to be a middle school reading level at best, which in my opinion was offensive for the price I paid. Entrepreneurs deserve more in a book that is supposed to help one's business venture prosper. This book really doesn't tell you much, which is a shame because I have only found a couple other books along this same genre. Only a few of the templates provided in the back of the book are worthwhile. The individual success stories were the best part about this book, whereas everything else is so superficial that it seems to be written more for people who have zero business knowhow and who are extremely rural folks. Also, the entire book mostly revolves around baking, which does not help as much for someone who is trying to make BBQ sauce or other food products. Also, only a handful of the Web resources were useful. It would have been nice to see more research on packaging because that represents a majority of your product costs. I have performed much research in the past month and have found many better places to find packaging and label printing (e.g. containerandpackaging.com or ebottles.com or psprint.com). Furthermore, the book should have provided a lot more information on constructing a proper formal business plan. I don't typically write bad reviews, but I would suggest even to the most novice beginner that YOU SHOULD FIND ANOTHER BOOK! Try to find something local first that explains the laws of the region in which you live because that is where the journey really begins. Without knowing what the local laws allow, you cannot even begin to understand whether your idea will work. Overall, this book has inspired me to perhaps write my own book on the topic.

It was very helpful and easy to understand. There are very useful examples provided, and I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in starting a PT food business.

Good read

From an author with what appears to be good credentials I expected a lot more from this book, particularly for the price. Instead, what you get is a poorly written booklet which skims over each topic, some vague diagrams and templates and content that is, overall, only applicable if you're a US resident. Unfortunately, I have to say that I would not waste my time with this one.