Assignment 24 - Venture Concept No. 1

Opportunity

First, I would like to explain the opportunity my venture concept tries to exploit.
Nowadays many people have a special diet, from glutenfree to vegetarian and vegan. The trend for those special diets is increasing. Around 4% of all Americans have a vegetarian diet, and nearly 50% of all Millennials say, that they eat vegetarian. A lot of those young people cannot stick to their diet when eating outside. Especially fast-food restaurants have very little to no vegetarian alternatives on their menu. Thus, customers have to eat meals with meat instead of a vegetarian dinner, or they have to go for the side dishes, e.g. side salads or fries. The market for vegetarian fast-food restaurants is limited to regions where many young and open-minded people life, i.e. cities or colleges. In those regions, a vegetarian fast-food restaurant would find enough customers to flourish. Since having special diets is a trend, the “window of opportunity” is not open forever, but I think opening the fast-food restaurant within the next 3 years would make sense.

Innovation

Second, I would like to point out to which degree my business venture is an innovation. Opening a fast-food restaurant doesn’t seem innovative at all. But the innovation is in the details. Firstly, my venture will offer a wide range of vegetarian food:

· Vegetarian hamburgers with lettuce wrapping (which makes it much more healthy),

· Vegetarian hotdogs,

· Vegetarian pizza (with vegetable dough),

· Falafel,

· Bowls and

· A wide variety of salad

Furthermore, my fast-food venture will be mobile. It will be kind of a food truck with chairs and tables in front of it to enable customers to sit down and enjoy their food. The mobility allows me to change the location whenever I think it is appropriate. For example, during the day I would settle my food truck close to the campus to serve all the students who are stressed out and don’t want to cook for themselves. During night time, I would change my location and open the food truck in downtown or midtown to serve the people on their way home from clubbing. Additionally, I will be able to offer reasonable prices by cutting the costs for rent. Using a food-truck is much cheaper, and I will only have to pay the investment in the food-truck and maybe sometimes a small amount for the permission of placing my truck at specific locations, but that’s it – no huge monthly rent payments that increase consumer prices.
In addition to vegetarian food, my business will also serve ordinary fast-food with meat. This combination is an innovation because as I pointed out above most fast-food restaurants serve only meals with meat and most vegetarian restaurants (and I mean decent restaurants) do not serve meals with meat. The combination of both is what is missing in the market.

Venture Concept

Now I would like to explain how my innovation applies to the opportunity described in the first part. My business venture meets the unmet need of consumers who are vegetarian or eat healthily and want to have a fast meal – either after a long day of classes or after a night full of clubbing. My business venture offers them the opportunity to get some delicious and healthy food regardless of whether they want to eat meals with or without meat. Often groups of people struggle with the issue that some persons wish to eat vegetarian and some people would like to eat meat – sometimes groups even have to split up for having lunch or dinner. That would not be the case when they would eat at my fast-food truck, which serves food for everybody.
I think my customers won’t have high switching costs – neither financially nor emotionally. I believe that many students would switch from buying e.g. at Chick-Fil-A or Wendy’s to my fast-food truck because it will be closer to them and thus more convenient. Thanks to the mobility of my fast-food truck, I will always be at the right spot to the right time to be closer to my customer than any other fast-food restaurant.

The three minor elements

1) As described in the assignment #23 “your venture’s unfair advantage,” my top resource is my passion for food. It will make sure, that the fast-food I will serve is not ordinary, but made with love and the passion for vegetarian and healthy food. This differentiates it from usual fast-food restaurants whose primary focus is to serve the food as fast as they can, neglecting the quality of food.

2) I am not sure about the next opportunity, but I can imagine to open up more than one food-truck or even a proper fast-food restaurant when the business is flourishing.

3) It is challenging to describe “what’s next for me.” In five years, I hope to be able to concentrate on managing the business rather than cooking the food by myself. Although my passion for food is the top resource of my venture, I don’t think that I have to cook the food by myself though. My goal is to share this passion among my employees and encourage them to prepare the food with the same love as I would do.