Writing a business plan for a small juice company

Before turning your passion for fruits into a successful juice company, it may helpful to consider putting together a business plan. Having one let’s you seek funding opportunities from potential investors or approach a bank for a loan. A plan in place also allows you to compare your performance in the future with what you expected initially.

To give you the relevant information you need in your business plan for a juice company, this guide covers:

• Describing your business
• Finding your audience
• SWOT analysis for the company
• Assuring health and safety standards
• Providing financial projections

The first section of your business plan should be used to explain what your company does. There are two main points to consider including: your unique selling point and your brand.

Your USP (unique selling point) is the reason that customers would choose to buy juice from you instead of another business. Whatever makes your product different (your flavours, ingredients or process, for example), describe it in your plan. 

When writing your business, you should also explain and display your branding. The brand should provide your business with an identity of its own. You will likely want to build loyalty from your customers for your juice company. Having a solid brand is a great way to do that.

Branding covers a few areas for your business. The name of your company, logo, fonts, colour scheme and tone of voice can all be outlined in your brand guidelines. Putting together guidelines shows potential investors the ability of the company to market itself.

Another essential section to put into your business plan is to explain who your company is going to target. To find out who would be best to target, you want to complete market research and then use a customer profile to describe them.

By carrying out market research for your business, you gain more of an understanding of the people who you would like to buy juice from you. You may have a broad or narrow audience for your product, but without research, you could miss out on critical insights that would help your brand.

To carry out the research, you can either look for first-hand knowledge by speaking directly to audiences (for example interview people and ask them how they would respond to your company) or second-hand from looking into potential competitors to see who they target (for example check other juice brands’ social media platforms and judge who is likely to use them).

Putting together customer profiles (sometimes called customer avatars) helps define your target audience in a way that is easy to imagine. This will help explain who they are in your plan and give you some insight into your future marketing. You will think about the best channels to use based on your profiles.

To put together a customer profile, detail a hypothetical person based on your market research. Write a summary about their lifestyles, including details like their name, age, location and occupation.

Your business plan needs to convince investors or lenders that your company will succeed. Using a SWOT analysis that focuses on your strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities can show that you have considered every area of your venture.

Explaining why your business should succeed provides some key points to highlight as your strengths. You may have previous experience selling juice at a stall before you set up the company, for example.

Detailing the weaknesses of your business gives the impression that you are realistic and proactive towards improvements. Mention areas you may be unfamiliar with and why you would do to overcome that. For example, if you have little experience in finance say that you plan to use an accounting tool like Countingup to make it easier.

There will likely be potential opportunities for your business to take advantage of in the future. Mentioning these in your plan shows that you are enterprising. For example, with more people working from home in 2022, you plan to trial a delivery service later in the year.

There is a likelihood of possible threats for any business that you would have to overcome. You can also mention what you will avoid or handle that situation by identifying some. For example, if the costs of getting imported fruits rise, you would bring out a new locally sourced line of juices for which you could possibly charge a higher price.

To reassure potential investors that you will meet health and safety standards, you could detail the plans you have in place following UK Government guidelines.

You should mention what your plans are for:

• Handling your drinks
• Preparing drinks
• How drinks will be stored
• Keeping the facilities clean

You can also mention other measures you intend to take to ensure that customers are safe to consume your drinks. For example, by clearly labelling all of the ingredients in each juice so that if someone has an allergy to something, they can avoid it.

Many investors and lenders will look closely at the financial information you put in your business plan. As a result, it would be helpful to include your estimated sales for the following month, quarter or year.

To display your projected sales, consider using a sales forecast. Through your market research, you may find information on how many customers other juice companies have a month. 

Estimate the number of customers to expect. Then, by multiplying this figure by the prices you intend to charge for drinks, it should leave you with a forecast for the amount of money you expect to see from sales.

To make sure that your juice company can provide financial projections in your plan, it would be useful to set up a separate account and use accounting software.

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage your financial data in one place. It includes expense categorisation which will automatically put relevant costs together, helpful for keeping finances organised.

When comparing your business performance with your plan later on, Countingup also provides business reports which give you all the information that you need to know. Seamless, simple and straightforward!

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