📝Background 

Wellington based artisan sauce business. Betsita's manufactured Latin American inspired sauces. To register Betsitas as a food business in New Zealand, I had to develop a National Programme level 2 proposal for the Hutt City Council, that met food safety legislative requirements according to the Food Act 2014. 

The Betsita's project has now been closed, due to product supply issues, is no longer viable. Benefits have been realised, as the main objectives and expected benefits were: to gain experience in a startup project and test the introduction of a new Latin product in the New Zealand food industry, it's been a great experience. The project has been delivered on time, cost and quality, with no major issues or risks, and no impact to delivery, and benefits realisation. 

📈Product Development 

Betsita's project initially started with a very rustic product, selling at the local farmer's market in Wellington.  

Betsita's started with an online Prestashop. After running on that platform for a while, it was then identified that a more practical online solution was needed. An evaluation was done to compare several cloud hosted ecommerce platforms, and based on the business requirements and budget, the shop got migrated to Big Cartel, as it was a low maintenance, and the best combination of cost and quality to meet customer requirements.

After the sauce making process got improved, the recipes got standardised. Betsita's Ltd also invested in better manufacturing processes and procedures as the demand increased, for example:  

• Labelling started as a manual process, after a few months in business,  Betsita's Ltd invested in a small desktop labelling machine that enabled the labelling of the bottles process to be more practical, reducing time and cost. 

• Initially we started using a food processor to make sauce for micro batches, after a couple of months of selling the product, demand increased and a bigger  vegetable grinder was purchased, that allowed micro batches to be made in less amount of time.  

• Taking care of the tamper tell safety of the product packaging was very time consuming, after doing a market research, better quality bottles were found with tamper tell caps that didn't require any manual tamper security process. This enhanced product safety, and efficiency. 

• The ingredients used to be manually prepared for the mise en place, when the demand for the sauces increased, the capacity for doing that reduced, so an investigation was done and a vegetable local supplier was found. The supplier delivered all the ingredients prepared, pre cut, and ready for production. The production method got simplified as well, with the introduction of xanthan gum, a natural  ingredient, that helped bind the sauce, preventing separation.

• By investing in  better equipment and modifying processes, efficiency and productivity got improved, reducing manufacturing time, cost and complexity.