The aim of Food Academy is to provide small food businesses with a solid foundation to progress confidently onto retail shelves. Participants receive training in food safety, market research and branding, marketing, finance, sustainability, and business development.
Crucially SuperValu also provide successful participants with the opportunity to trial their product in their local stores for a period of 12 weeks. This provides a real advantage to small businesses in terms of real retail learnings, as they are able to liaise with the store to gain feedback on their product from both the store staff and consumers. Such learnings will help the producer to further develop their product, marketing approach, packaging and distribution.
There are now over 300 Food Academy small producers in Supervalu stores and half of all Food Academy participants expect sales to increase by 50% or more over the next 12 months.
Who can participate?
The Food Academy is aimed at those in the early to mid-stages of developing a food or drink business who have already developed a product, trialed it in the marketplace and are looking to scale up and grow the business. This programme is not suitable for early stage start ups.