Executive Summary
Smart Bakery will launch the pizza cupcakes, the first small pizza product in the market so far. The pizza cake has a unique recipe and low calories volumes, making it an outstanding snack among many others in the market. Pizza cupcakes are aimed at solving customers’ desire for pizza in a comfortable size, fluffy, and cheesy snack that can be taken anytime from anywhere. Our cupcakes are of two main types, including pepperoni and Margherita, and other toppings. The consumption of fast foods and snacks in the US is high, and it is likely to grow further in the years to come. Among the primary reasons for the high rate of fast food usage is tight working schedules, urbanization, globalization, and a culture of eating among university and college students.
Smart Bakery sells a 12 pack of pizza cupcakes at $24.95, which means that one item costs $2.08. The prices for wholesalers are lower, with a cupcake selling at $1.8, and a 24 pack is sold at $44.95. Our pizza cupcakes’ taste and value offer an added advantage, as customers prefer the experience. Our bakery’s growth is promising, and we predict our revenues in the first year to grow up to $300,000, which will double by the end of year three and amount to approximately $1 million in five years. Moreover, our bakery plans to increase sales through mechanization, market expansion, and the employment of more experienced personnel. The company’s ultimate goal is to create a new pizza experience and sharing of love globally through a tasty, healthier, and simple snack. We believe in making a difference, showing care to the world by offering naturally-baked snacks. Below is our sales plan, which will direct our steps towards achieving our goals.
Business: Products/Services
Smart Bakery will reveal its trade secret dough using high-quality products and homemade sauce. The Pizza Cupcake will transform the way people perceive frozen pizza. The product will be made of mozzarella and Italian San Marzano tomato. It will take shape and size of a truly bona fide Italian pizza. Smart Bakery will offer its pizza cupcake in two varieties, including pepperoni and Margherita. Each of them will be made from naturally sourced ingredients from local suppliers, who will not use preservatives to conserve their products.
Smart Bakery seeks to provide an outstanding pizza experience in a small pizza cupcake that can be enjoyed anytime and anywhere. Its bite-size is convenient to customers of all ages, including children and the elderly. Pizza cupcakes will be helpful to families, students, working-class people, and all other categories as a side dish for the three meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. People will not need a special occasion or a specific time to enjoy the pizza, as it will be available as any other snack.
The bakery will provide pizza cupcakes 24 hours a day, apart from customizing them to fit every customer’s taste. Our target population includes everyone in the market since people of all ages can consume it. However, Smart Bakery will put more focus on delivering pizza cupcakes to organizations such as learning institutions and companies, as well as offering them during events such as birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings. The company will also deliver its products following any other occasional request. The most outstanding feature of our pizza cupcakes is the small size with extraordinary ingredients. It is even more favorable during the Covid-19 pandemic time when people are opting for fast foods, which can be consumed indoors. During this period of isolation, people can still celebrate events and share the same meal from different places by consuming pizza cupcakes.
Industry/Customer/Competitive Analysis
The consumption of fast foods, such as pizza cupcakes, is high in most developed countries due to their convenience and preference by many high-income earners. The globe has changed significantly, with many people, including women joining the labor force with tight schedules. Such people lack enough time to prepare food at home, opting for readily available snacks. Moreover, youth and children are the most consumers of pizza cupcakes and other fast foods, contributing to the majority of Smart Bakery’s products (Min et al., 2018). Although many people have transformed to healthier diets, our pizza cupcakes do no harm because they are baked from natural ingredients, attracting more consumers.
More than a third of the world’s population consumes fast food, and the number is projected to increase further. Customers buy fast food at different times of the day, mainly between 6 pm to 9 pm, and small amounts during the rest of the day. Statistics use statistics that comprise data from 2011 to 2020 to forecast the next four years’ consumption rate. The information is reliable because it is based on Simmons National Consumer Survey and the US census data. According to the statistics, in 2020, over 95 million Americans are ready to consume fast foods, and the number could be more than 99 million by 2024 (Statistica, 2020). Smart Bakery has a higher chance of growing ad gaining a competitive edge as consumers increase. Figure 2 shows the previous year’s increase in meals taken out of homes in the US.
Smart Bakery will also focus on nuclear families whose majority of members are youngsters preferring fast food. Since pizza cupcakes are taken as snacks and during recreational activities, the Bakery will associate them with different themes depending on occasions, seasons of the years, and other festivities. That way, customers will have customized and more appealing cupcakes for various events. Further, people prefer food such as pizza cupcakes at their workplace due to their jobs’ tight schedules, although others take them for fun (Min et al., 2018). Smart Bakery targets youngsters and such working-class individuals, as older people consume fewer junk compared to younger people.
Customers are more focused on taste and price in fast food, especially in joint families. Although people like outdoor consumptions, the pizza must be tastier than their homemade food to keep them buying it. Smart Bakery will use unique recipes, including Italian San Marzano and mozzarella, in its two wide varieties of Margherita and pepperoni. To enhance the taste and quality of our cupcakes, we will use natural ingredients from local suppliers. Using such sources will help our Bakery get fresh items from the market, avoid delays in the supply chain and use locally accepted standards while still promoting wellbeing. Our prices will be favorable to a wide range of customers as all materials will be acquired from within, offsetting production costs.
Further, Smart Bakery will establish strong relationships with suppliers through timely payment, advanced communication, and inventory management by investing in current technologies and software for customer and supply management. We will also use unique marketing strategies such as events sponsoring, advertisement, and competitions to involve our customers. Additionally, the company will adhere to its corporate social responsibility to give back to the community, as it is our primary support in sourcing ingredients utilizing the final products. Our company will also invest highly in human resources to ensure that our staff is well trained in customer service, marketing, and more importantly, in the production of pizza cupcakes. Smart Bakery will encourage innovation from the staff in the products’ design, marketing, and technology by rewarding successful inventions while discouraging unnecessary competition and conflict within the organization. The Bakery will offer dining services, takeaway, and delivery orders for customers to eliminate the traffic struggle and time-consciousness for the working population. Our Bakery will not sell the product but the feeling and experience that comes along with their consumption.
Sales Strategy
Smart Bakery will use disparate strategies to effectively allocate scarce resources in sales, including people, money, and selling efforts. We will enhance our customer relationships management based on particular customer’s value to our business. Our Bakery will establish a customer-oriented culture, such that our salespeople will develop a tendency of prioritizing meeting our customers’ needs before everything else. This culture will help our sales team assist customers in making purchasing decisions that will gratify their needs, creating long-term satisfaction (Hughes & Ogilvie, 2020). Our company will focus on working in the customers’ best interest by identifying pizza cupcakes that meet their consumption patterns.
We will also embrace value-based selling through close collaboration with customers, retail, and wholesale shops to promote every stakeholder’s cost-saving aspect. Through advanced customer-seller interactions, our business will get feedback on the experience of pizza cupcakes. Moreover, it will also utilize social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and its website, to promote and make sales. We will also facilitate feedback from social media and Bakery’s website to know what improvements we should make to gain a larger market share (Makhitha & Wright, 2019). The Bakery will establish strong relationships with all stakeholders in the supply chain to ensure our pizza cupcakes secure a higher ranking in the market.
Smart Bakery will use organic frontline ambidexterity, which is market-driven rather than an organizational-driven strategy. Our sales team’s main focus and responsibilities will include; acquiring customers by sharing insights and recognizing their needs through consultative selling (Hughes & Ogilvie, 2020). They will provide pizza cupcakes by managing customer relationships and expansion of relationships through solution co-creation.
Smart Bakery will promote relational transactions through an ongoing value creation of our pizza cupcakes, alignment of our activities with sales services while optimizing our relationships with all stakeholders, mainly the customers and suppliers.
Pricing Structure
Pizza cupcakes are unique and new to the market as there is no other company offering the same. Customers are used to buying big-sized pizza, which is not only expensive but also too big for one person. Pizza cupcakes are more likely to gain popularity during the pandemic when gatherings and other forms of partying are discouraged. Our products do not have direct competition, and therefore Smart Bakery is in a better position to grow and expand its market share. The only product with almost similar features is the McDonald’s products, particularly the hamburger and cheeseburger, which costs $ 2.29 and $2.00 consecutively. McDonald’s Big Mac is also a potential competing item to our pizza cupcake, and its costs $3.99. Most fast foods in the US are cheap because of their ease of preparation and simple recipes.
Pizza cupcake is different from the McDonalds hamburger and Big Mc in disparate ways. One of the distinguishing features is its size which makes their consumption easy. Some snacks are embarrassing to eat, especially when in a public place, but pizza is the best-suited snack for such environments. The cupcakes have low calories, which is 160, which is much lower than most fast foods. In addition to the good experience, the product is health-conscious hence a higher rate of acceptability.
Considering all our product’s unique features, we suggest the prices of $24.95 per 12 pack, which is relatively $2.08 per pizza cupcake. The price is fair to all categories of people considering the convenience associated with the cupcakes. Pizza lovers can attest that selling the cupcakes at such a price is more of a favor since a whole pizza costs $7.25 to $15. Buying a whole pizza is expensive for some families, and therefore, the cupcakes will be favorable for them. The prices will differ in wholesale and retail shops to spare some profit margin for them. The bakery will set a price of $44.95 per 24 pack in wholesale outlets, which is approximately $1.8 per cupcake (The Pizza Cupcake, 2021). The prices will give the distributors higher profits to enhance their survival and reduce chances of dealing with competitors by benefiting from economies of scale.
Revenue Goals
Pizza cupcakes have proven to be a high selling product in the market, and the revenues will continue growing gradually. However, the combination of owners’ experiences, perfect art of pizza making, and event planning skills contributed significantly to the products’ success. Over the past years, pizza cupcakes generated $77,000 in sales, which is quite impressive for a new item. The revenues were generated through manual work as the Bakery had no machines and relied on a co-parker to present our products. Having found a strategic partner to invest $125000 in our bakery for 5% equity will push our products further. Our new working capital will be $77000 plus the $125000 from the shark tank totaling $200000. In the first year, the revenue is expected to grow to $300000 because of the acquisition of machines to reduce manual work. Automations will help our bakery to produce more pizza cupcakes at a particular time and reduce production cost. Additionally, our bakery will have more money for marketing our products, which will create awareness consequently increasing the sales volume. In the next three years, our revenues will have doubled to $60000, and by the end of the fifth year, it will be $1.2 million.
Our bakery aims at keeping production costs minimal without compromising the quality of the products. We are also aware of the market vulnerabilities of our ingredients, especially because they are agricultural connected. The economy is also unpredictable, and inflation effects will definitely affect the business environment (Hyde et al., 2017). Our Bakery will minimize fixed costs to improve flexibility during downtime. Other variable costs such as marketing, surplus labor, costs of raw materials, and others will be adjusted to ensure the business remains profitable and competitive.
Distribution Channels
Smart Bakery will use partnerships to distribute pizza cupcakes to the market. The first partnership will be with Lori Greiner from Shark Tank, who accepted our offer to invest $125000 in our bakery in exchange for 12.5% equity and 2.5% advisory shares (Weyant, 2021). The partnership is helpful to our bakery mainly because Lori has succeeded with her Bantam Bagels, and therefore including pizza cupcakes in the products will definitely work out. Our bakery will utilize Lori’s distribution channels already existing in her bagel business. Using her channel will help us reach the market easily and at a lower cost. It will also increase our cupcakes’ acceptance rate, as they will be sold along with an already established brand, rather than as a new product.
Smart Bakery has also embraced e-commerce, especially due to the closure of most outlets and food stores during the pandemic have been delivering our Cupcakes to customers after receiving their orders from our website. As the bakery grows, we will start selling the products through online stores such as Amazon. However, shipping is costly as the platform charges our bakery a certain percentage per product, and therefore the cupcakes will be expensive in those regions than in the US. After the pandemic, our bakery will collaborate with retail and wholesale. Still, their identification will be determined then depending on various factors considering that we cannot assume they will re-open after the pandemic their economic status by then. Smart Bakery also collaborates with Damascus bakery to distribute the pizza to customers across New York.
Sales Organization
The bakery has employees and therefore does not have a solid sales team. Before the spreading of covid-19, our products were available at various food outlets in New York. The bakery is mostly operating in e-commerce, shipping pizza to California, Arizona, and the East Coast region (The Pizza Cupcake, 2021). Since smart bakery delivers pizza directly to clients, there is no established structure for salespeople and other distributing agents. However, after the pandemic and expansion of the bakery to other regions, particularly outside the US, we will develop a sales team to promote our products. In some countries and regions, pizza cupcakes are not known, and therefore, we will need people, especially locals, to push the brand. Our bakery will create a compensation plan for them mainly on commission after a particular number of boxes during that time. Our bakery is not limited to states in the US as our dream is to become a global business in pizza cupcakes shipping our products to all continents.
Product Promotion
Smart Bakery promotes its pizza cupcakes in various ways, and it will practice corporate social responsibility. Our bakery dedicates one box in every 24-park orders placed to frontline workers, especially health workers, during the pandemic. The initial delivery to be made was on March 31 to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (Ong, 2020). The bakery also supports non-profit organizations such as the lower Girls club to support their goals by delivering to more than 100 club members’ families.
Smart Bakery also utilizes special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, and other international holidays to promote its brand. Our bakery also uses indirect promotional techniques involving celebrities to teach pizza preparation (Crouse, 2021). The video taken in July 2019 with Mariah trended globally, giving our product an outstanding awareness. Smart Bakery also hosts events with major corporates such as Comedy Central, the New York Times, Instagram, and Buzzfeed. The main online promotional platforms include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok, in which we post videos as people enjoy the products and share them.
References
Crouse, L. (2021). The Pizza Cupcake. Shark Tank Products. Web.
Hughes, D. E., & Ogilvie, J. L. (2020). When sales becomes service: The evolution of the professional selling role and an organic model of frontline ambidexterity. Journal of Service Research, 23(1), 22–32. Web.
Hyde, A. M., Jain, D. Verma, S. K. & Jain, A. (2017). A study of exploratory buying behavior tendencies in FMCG sector. International Journal on Recent Trends in Business and Tourism (IJRTBT), 1(2), 16-27. Web.
Makhitha, K. M. & Wright, L. T. (2019) Supplier relationship marketing practices and small retailer performance in South Africa. Cogent Business & Management, 6(1), 1-18. Web.
Min, J., Jahns, L., Xue, H., Kandiah, J., & Wang, Y. (2018). Americans’ perceptions about fast food, and how they associate with its consumption and obesity risk. Advances in Nutrition, 9(5), 590–601. Web.
Ong, B. (2020). New Yorkers can now get pizza cupcakes delivered to their doors. Timed Out. Web.
Statistica. (2020). U.S. population: Consumption of packaged muffins (ready-to-eat) from 2011 to 2024. Statistica. Web.
The Pizza Cupcake. (2021). An American dream years in the baking. The Pizza Cupcake. Web.
Weyant, J. (2021). Shark Tank: The pizza cupcake accepts $125,000 from Lori Greiner. Business-to-community. Web.