New Venture Opportunity Delish Confections

Delish Confections has been around since June, 2013. It is a newly established family-owned business in the heart of Gold Coast city, Queensland, Australia. Delish Confections is a craft bakery that promotes and sells a wide variety of breads, cookies, cakes, brownies, donuts, rolls, fillings, snacks, muffins, batters & coaters, spreads & smears, ice creams, pretzels, waffle cone mixes, carbonated soft drinks, energy drinks, and numerous dairy and non-dairy food items. Delish Confections is committed to provide the highest quality of baked food, confectionary items, and beverage products at very competitive prices. The company is currently operating in 11 cities in Queensland State and has employed 73 people at its stores, offices, and production units.

SWOT Analysis for Delish Confections

Strengths:

The biggest strength of Delish Confections is its manufacturing capabilities and integrated product range. With the help of advanced production plants and machineries, Delish Confections is able to manufacture the highest quality of baked foods, confectionary items, and beverages.

This new business is set up with a strong asset base and financial stability. Therefore, the owners are able to grow it in new geographical areas (through horizontal integration) and across supply chain (through vertical integration).

Delish Confections also has potential to become a competitive foods manufacturing company. Its resources (assets, people, advanced plants and machineries, etc.) have largely contributed in its remarkable sales performance since its inception.

The financial strength of the company also supports its marketing reach and distribution activities. Delish Confections has expanded its sales and distribution network in 11 cities and towns in a very short period of 3 months.

The extensive product range and strong distribution network has successfully established the brand image of Delish Confections in the Queensland confectionary market.

Moreover, Delish Confections has maintained strong relationships with the local raw material suppliers, product distributors, and business development firms. The suppliers provide the top quality taw material and ingredients to manufacture baked foods, confectionary items, and beverages that are delectable, healthful, and rich in taste and quality. By offering a wide range of competitive brands, Delish Confections receives favorable consumer perception in Gold Coast and other major cities of the state.

Delish Confections also enjoys attractive profit margins on its beverage product...

Some of its beverage brands have thrown out the smaller competitors from the market.
2. Weaknesses:

Despite having a number of strengths and competitive advantages, Delish Confections is also experiencing certain drawbacks in its operational setup and processes. First of all, Delish Confections is unable to establish a large customer base due to the presence of various stronger brands in the market.

The fixed cost base for Delish Confections is significantly high which is putting direct negative impacts on profit margins.

Delish Confections is internally focused: giving greater emphasis on enhancing its internal manufacturing capabilities and operational efficiency. On the other hand, its focus on customer services and technological innovation is quite unsatisfactory. It does not have any online store or marketing website yet which could be a major source of brand awareness and sales beyond current target locations.

Some of the backed food items offered by Delish Confections have low level of acceptability among target consumers. Reason being, either they premium-priced and cannot be purchased by a large consumer segment on daily basis; or they are poor in taste and quality.

Lack of product differentiation is another major weakness of Delish Confections. Most of its baked foods and confectionary items are hard to be differentiated from the competitor brands except on the basis of quality and taste. Delish Confections needs to improve its product design as well as introduce same products with different ingredients and varying flavors.

Moreover, new investors prefer to build relationships with well-established brands of the country due to their reputation and financial stability. Delish Confections is still new in the market with very limited customer base and geographic reach. Therefore, most of its supply chain members and business associates are small and medium size firms.

3. Opportunities:

First of all, Delish Confections should form an online store and marketing website to promote and sell its products to a larger customer segment in a more effective and efficient way (Sanders, 2007). It can open new stores in those areas where population density is large.

It can add new items to its existing product lines. The foods and beverage products which have low level of acceptability can be improved and differentiated with better quality ingredients and flavor variations respectively (Kotler, Brown, Burton, Deans, & Armstrong, 2010).

Delish Confections can increase its profit margins on low profit brands by controlling unnecessary…