On November 4th, Best in Nature attended the Annual Food and Beverage Symposium at The Preserve in LA. It was an event hosted by Naturally LA, an organization that focuses on advising startups and small businesses in the natural products space. Best in Nature takes part to stay on top of the latest products as well as stay current on best practices. 

This year’s symposium was an evening where the top leaders in the health food products space discussed the next steps. Once you have a great product, how do you get it into even more hands? Here are a few key points from the presentation. 

Planning

New companies start all the time so founders and investors shared the pitfalls specific to launching and sustaining businesses around healthy foods and supplements. 

Overall, they emphasized spending wisely, investing in the right marketing, and how to find the right partners and vendors. 

Staying Honest

Next, panelists talked about keeping the promises brands make to consumers. Once you earn trust, it’s important to make every decision in that context. 

At every step you take, make sure to be honest with your customers. 

Health is Important to a Startup (Just Like Your Body)

Something that’s underdiscussed for the health of a company or startup is finding the right kinds of investors. Sure investment is money and that gives you the opportunity to expand or create new products. 

But at what cost? Investors have their own interests so it's important to carefully investigate the conditions of any investment and to ensure your interests align with potential investors. 

Questions to consider

• What are their timelines for how long they’ll stay invested in your company? 
• What kind of partnership do they want? 
• How long do they plan to keep the founders around for? 
• How often do they change founders at previous businesses? 

However, investors do have their own concerns. Some questions investors typically ask of health startups. 

• Are you omnichannel?
• Do you have good cashflow?
• What are your sales, revenue, profits? 
• Do you have brand loyalty? 

Use Tools

Startups often have a founder involved in every part of the business so panelists discussed transitioning towards a position where you can delegate more. 

Multiple tools are available such as fractional leadership CMOs/CFOs, AI Agents and enterprise software. 

In short, those were some of the major takeaways from this year’s Food and Beverage Symposium hosted by Naturally LA.