Do you work with or for food and beverage manufacturers? Can you shed light on decision dynamics?

We develop software for food manufacturers so I can respond related to what I see at our clients.

The determination of what ingredients to buy tends to be with R&D/Food Science while the answer on who to buy from is with purchasing.

I would also say that you must divide the ingredients into a couple classes. There are those that are functional foods - proteins etc. These are necessary to make the food perform the way it must. Then there are flavor ingredients that are used to make the food acceptable to our pallet and then there is filler.

If possible you want to be in the functional ingredient space or at least market that way. If you do that they you drive your placement in the recipe. I would imagine you would want to stay away from being the commodity ingredient as that is very low margin and high volumes.

So to get on the radar screen of the R&D you must solve a problem that they experience on their formulas.

The next person is purchasing. They are typically looking for price and small lot sizes with quick turn around. You might want to consider consignment inventory so they can run it as just in time. That is up to you on how big is the potential business.

I hope that helps.

Randy