During the fundraising phase, your banker will mainly focus on the consistency of your project. Economic and financial analysis, forecasting, ability to generate profits quickly. Nothing will be left out.

To certify the viability of your project, the preparation of your plan and the calculation of your profitability will be essential. This document must absolutely appear in your business plan, otherwise your request for financing will be refused by the bank.

The good news is that with Melba, you will be able to carry out this analysis quickly and efficiently, whilst adhering to the reality of your business as closely as possible.

1. Referring Suppliers

The first step is to retrieve the catalog from different suppliers with the associated purchase costs. Once the catalogs have been retrieved, you can start referencing the different suppliers in the Melba application.

Then add the different items and associate their purchase costs with them. You will then be able to make a trade-off between the quality and the costs of your products , but also to choose the cost, which will be used for the calculation of the margin.

Refine by accounting for weight loss: peeling, shelling, cutting, etc. A certain number of products are purchased at gross weight but undergo systematic processing before being used in recipes.

For example, lemons bought in boxes of 2kg, once squeezed, make 1L of lemon juice ⇒ the purchase cost of 2.5 € / kg actually comes up to a cost of 5 € / kg.

2. Build Recipe databases

Evaluate the Cost

It's time to get down to business! Now that you have referenced your suppliers and the purchase costs of each item, you can begin to build your recipe databases and evaluate their cost.

Thanks to Melba, you can compose your recipes by breaking down the list of ingredients and sub-recipes. Let us take the example of lasagna: it is a recipe in its own right but it is also made up of sub-recipes "béchamel" and "bolognaise".

By organizing your recipes in this way, the application avoids the repetition of data , and allows an automatic update of your recipes when the costs or the composition of sub-recipes are adjusted.

Evaluate the gross margin

Start by setting the selling price of your recipes. For this, try to respect ratios. Traditionally, it is considered that 25% maximum material cost is required , otherwise it becomes more difficult to absorb labor costs and structural costs.

Also consider adjusting your sale price by sale quantity. It is more natural to discount when volume increases.

3. Refine Your Marketing Mix

You now have a finer picture of your costs and potential margins. To go even further and consolidate your business plan, you need to refine your marketing mix.

For this you have several levers at your disposal:

• One of the first areas of improvement in your marketing mix is ​​to balance the best-sellers and slow-movers on your list.
• Then negotiate with your potential suppliers the excessively high purchase costs, in particular on the products that will be sold the most, that is to say on the most purchased materials.
• Favor the cheaper ingredients in the recipe for a fixed amount. For example, you can substitute vegetables for meat. However, pay attention to the nutritional / flavor impact on your customers.
• Reduce the quantities for a fixed composition.
• Increase sales prices for a fixed quantity

Once these steps are completed, you can now export all your data to an Excel file to integrate them into your business plan!