Sunday Week 9 Meeting - FINAL PITCH SCRIPT, SLIDES & ONE PAGER
Final Script
[Slide 2] We are a nation of pet lovers. In fact, New Zealand leads the world in cat ownership per capita. With a total cat population of 1.134 million, they’re our most popular pet. If even a quarter of these cats are fed one single serve meal a day, this could send over 100 million pieces of non-biodegradable waste to landfill each year!
This is the amount of packaging waste produced by the average cat in one week [show dirty packaging]. This massive waste stream produced by the pet industry’s single serve and single use packaging is simply not sustainable.
There is however, a large, growing eco-friendly trend in New Zealand. We’ve spoken to a number of eco-conscious New Zealand cat owners and there is a clear demand for a more sustainable alternative to wasteful plastic or aluminium wet food packaging.
In tackling this challenge, our team wants to go beyond just producing a more recyclable or biodegradable packaging solution, we want to change cat owner’s habits to produce less waste.
[Slide 3] For this reason our big idea is bulk bins of self serve dehydrated cat food - eliminating the need for single use packaging whilst still offering all the benefits of single serve meals. We want to become a niche New Zealand pet food company who manufactures nutritious dehydrated cat food made with human grade ingredients sourced from local, organic farms.
We would package the bulk lot of dehydrated pet food in large bio-degradable plastic bags for transport to retailers through distributor Bidfood. These retailers would be; organic grocery stores, bulk buy stores, and pet stores.
We would ask customers to bring their own reusable containers to fill from the bulk bins, reducing the need for packaging and extending the lifecycle of other containers. As a safeguard recyclable brown paper bags would also be available to purchase for customers who forget to bring a container.
[Slide 4] Dehydrated food is a rising global trend - however it’s yet to reach New Zealand so there is a clear business opportunity here.
Dehydration works by removing the water content and doesn't effect the nutrients. To prepare the food, the cat owner rehydrates it with warm water and waits a few minutes to make a real meat, wet meal.
Additionally the environmental benefits of dehydrated food are that it is lightweight and compact, as the dry product triples in size when rehydrated so customers get far more meals out of a kilogram of product. These qualities mean that the product’s transportation has a smaller cost and carbon footprint than standard cat food.
[Slide 5] We have analysed the competitive wet cat food market in New Zealand and identified that there is a big opportunity in the space of sustainable packaging and quality food. The only company in this space in New Zealand is Jimbos. However, they do not reduce waste, they simply encourage reuse of their plastic pots in the home.
[Slide 6] Our ethos of reducing waste makes us the strongest competitor in this area. At every step along the lifecycle of our product, all environmental aspects are considered. Our system reduces packaging waste and provides an opportunity to reuse containers.
[Slide 7] We are aware that our product is niche and our system is new in regards to wet pet food, so we have planned a marketing budget of $30,000 to allow us to advocate the advantages of dehydrated food and our BYO container system to keep our already large customer base growing.
[Slide 8] We plan to have a strong social media presence and a clear, user-friendly website where customers can get rehydration instructions, helpful video tutorials, nutritional information etc. This is to navigate the difficulty of conveying information to customers when they are bringing their own container, not purchasing a pre-packaged product.
[Slide 9] We would pilot our system in Auckland at interested retailers; Wise Cicada, Commonsense Organics Mt Eden, and the four Auckland Bin Inns. Auckland is home to over 500,000 cats, the largest concentration of domestic cats in New Zealand. Auckland is also the closest major city to Te Puke, where we are proposing manufacturing our cat food.
Once proven, our concept will be able to be scaled nation-wide throughout a range of organic food stores, pet stores, and other stores such as Bin Inn, through our partnership with national distributor Bidfood. There is also the potential to expand into dehydrated dog food.
For future thinking, New Zealand’s disease free status allows New Zealand meat companies preferential access into key overseas markets, so there is the potential to go global with our product and system.
[Slide 10] So far, these retailers have given us written expressions of interest [Point to slide]. They think our idea sounds brilliant, they love that our product is organic and locally sourced, and they are happy to endorse and stock new products that benefit the environment.
[Slide 11] We have also had an overwhelmingly positive response from potential customers, with 847 indications of interest. This verifies to us that we are creating a solution to an issue that customers feel extremely passionate about.
At this point we don’t have concrete numbers on what our expenses or profits will be because a lot of the information we need to figure these out isn’t readily available. [Slide 12] However the average retail price for overseas dehydrated pet food is $35 per kg so this would likely be realistic for our product. As one kilogram of dry food rehydrates into 3 kilograms of wet food, a cat could get 35 standard meals from a $35 purchase - essentially $1 per serve. Our consumer research has shown us that this is a viable and affordable price to be asking of our target audience.
From this product cost estimate we can project that if we were providing pet food to just 5% of New Zealand cats, we would have a retail turnover of at least 20.7 million dollars.
[Slide 13] Today we are seeking strategic connections with business and industry experts for advice on how to move forward with our idea. These connections will enable us to figure out the costing and finalise the timeline of our business plan
Phase 1 of our business plan requires us to form a mentorship connection with organic and sustainable pet food manufacturer ‘Addiction Pet Foods’ in Te Puke. They offer consultancy services which would help us connect with suppliers and develop a nutritionally complete recipe.
[Slide 14] In phase 2 we would contract Addiction to manufacture our dehydrated pet food and pilot test our system through the retailers who have already indicated interest. In this stage we would expand into more stockists once our system is proven to work and build our customer base via marketing.
[Slide 15] Phase 3 would involve setting up our own manufacturing plant and expanding our range of recipes. We know that purchasing specialised machinery and sourcing a factory space will be our biggest upfront costs, and we would need investment to cover this.
We are confident that this is a worthwhile investment as pet food has been named one of the six best “Emerging Growth Opportunity” sectors of the New Zealand Food and Beverage Industry. In 2015 alone New Zealanders spent 747 million dollars on their cats, and this figure has been rising.
[Slide 16] In summary, our company goals are to; reduce single serve cat food packaging waste, produce quality, nutritional, organic pet food for cats, provide a system that is accessible and convenient for the customer, and maintain an eco-conscious story throughout our whole process.
There’s a huge gap in the market for sustainably packaged wet pet food and this self-serve concept has great potential to appeal to the target customers and reduce a large waste stream. We need your advice to help us move forward with our business.
[Slide 17] Kittykai, 'Delicious Taste - None Of The Waste' - revolutionising wasteful systems one cat's dinner at a time!
Final Slides
One Pager
Final Feedback From Dragons
