July 5×5 Night
Voting Closes:
July 22, 2024 11:59 am
Impact
Our community will experience fresh, authentic, and cost-effective meal alternative to fast-food restaurants.
What I'll do with $5,000
$5,000 will impact my business in three ways through the purchase of the equipment (dumpling making machine).
1) Production. We are experiencing problems with the amount of time spent in the kitchen. As a renter of kitchen space, more time in the kitchen means more money lost. We are currently reaching out to friends for help during this time, but we will eventually need to hire people to replace them. We are only able to produce around 600 dumplings in 6 hours with four people. Delayed production also causes us to do a limited amount of pop-ups during the week as we need nearly a full day of production to match the amount of dumplings to sell in events. $5000 will be spent towards the equipment that will free us of production time, kitchen rental, and people to fold them.
2) Quality. One of the biggest problems that we face as we fold dumplings is lack of consistency in our product. Although we measure the filling of the dumpling each time, the size of the filling varies between each dumpling. Furthermore, we face a major problem when we cook on-site as many of our dumplings "pop" open and are thrown away. On our first event, we threw out nearly 150 dumplings out of 500. Today, we threw out nearly 10% of our dumplings.
3) Time. Less production time means more pop-up time. Less production time also means more business time! By being free of time, we would be able to grow our business exponentially as our focus can be on going to events, making connections, and marketing. Today, we are contacted by many event coordinators and individuals to show up on their events. However, due to our lack of proĀ·fiĀ·cienĀ·cy we are turning away opportunities. $5000 can free us from major time spent in production.
As I am writing this, I just bought a plane ticket to go to New York to meet one of the owners who own the machine that I need from Korea. This owner showed interest in selling the machine at a fraction of price. I will be leaving for New York in a couple of hours to negotiate a deal. This $5000 will help my company to obtain the machine.
This machine will produce nearly 2500 dumplings an hour.