Background information
Starting your own business is exciting, rewarding and can be a good way to become financially independent.
However, it is a very big challenge, especially if you have never managed your own business before.
There are many people with good ideas interested in starting their own food business but sometimes they lack the knowledge or confidence to go ahead with it. These barriers faced by the new business owners are often the cause of failure.
The Food Enterprise Workshop came into being in 2011 when, after a successful application, it was granted funding from the European Regional Development Fund and the Working Neighbourhoods Fund.
The specific aim of this project is to provide support to people starting a food business. The Food Enterprise Workshop aims to offer a helping hand to these people by providing professional experience, supervision, equipment and free ingredients to test trade their ideas.
These ideas will be encouraged, coached and mentored by the workshop supervisor which will help to give participants a taste of how their idea could function as a business.
By tackling these issues, the workshop will in turn help people to support themselves, which will help to stimulate business growth in Leicester.
The Food Enterprise Workshop aims to fulfil local economic regeneration strategies and initiatives to promote a more diverse food sector within Leicester.
Currently Leicester is facing an inequality in it’s Food Sector: the ethnic diversity of the population is not reflected in the diversity of food businesses.
The Food Enterprise Workshop aims to be inclusive and supportive of ethnic minority groups, in order to help diversify Leicester’s food sector and more accurately represent the city’s cultural make-up.
In turn this should help to fuel Leicester’s economy as well
as its fast growing food sector. By being based at the city’s historic market, we have the opportunity to fast track Food Enterprise Workshop participants onto a real trading environment at a discounted rate to enable them take the
next step into self-employment.
Leicester is at the heart of the East Midlands, which already exists as a local area that has a lot to offer in terms of traditional foods such as Red Leicester Cheese, Melton Mowbray Pork Pies and Walkers Crisps.
The Food Enterprise Workshop aims to build upon this rich culture by broadening the diversity of what’s on offer to better reflect a diverse and multicultural Leicester.
So whatever your background and abilities are, if you have an interest in food business, enrol now! We have plenty of support on offer and are confident that this workshop will be a very helpful tool for new business starters.
