by Victoria Colligan

Are you a foodie? Are you passionate about all things food and cooking-related? If the answer is “yes”, consider starting your business in one of the following ways:

1. Link up with Tastefully Simple and become a rep for their products. The bonus? Throw parties for your friends and food tastings of new and original products. Check out Featured Lady Jill Blashack Strahan, founder of Tastefully Simple 
2. Start a catering business: This is an easy way to bring a service to the table with low overhead and upfront costs.
3. Buy a franchise for Dream Dinners: A service for families to prepare and store dinners in advance. Check out Featured Lady Stephanie Allen, founder of Dream Dinners .
4. Check out Chef’s Line  : a hotline that you can call into for cooking advice and tips. Consider joining their team as one of their chefs.
5. Start with one product: your best cookie or sauce recipe, for example. Attend bake sales, try selling to your friends. Enter a cook-off for your favorite food and see how you fare.
6. Start a website or social network around a specific type of food that you love and create community and connectivity around it. You can do this at very little cost by purchasing a unique domain name, putting up a very simple website and using open source social networks like Ning  to launch an instant online social network.
7. Become a personal home chef. More and more, home cooking services are not just for the elite. Many households are looking to outsource their food and cooking needs to others who can help them. Home chefs are a popular choice. Offer your services at reasonable prices and you will be high in demand. Be concise with menu options. To conserve energy and time, offer a limited menu with a diverse array of choices. This way you can more easily scale your services and even teach others to work under you and help you.

The most important advice I can give to women entrepreneurs is to take small steps every day toward their dreams. Surround yourself with like-minded women and put yourself in environments that revolve around your passion. When you take these initiatives, the energy is contagious and you are more likely to be successful. Passion and enthusiasm breed success. Enter as many contests as you can. Take home video and get exposure by putting it on YouTube. Be creative. Be original.

To save on costs and to be able to test plans as you move forward, consider starting a service related business around food first and use the proceeds from your service business to slowly help you finance your product idea. For example, if you have an idea for a kitchen gadget you would like to create, consider offering and marketing a series of cooking classes first. Create a prototype of the gadget and use your class environment as a focus group to test its appeal. This method not only provides you with seed money to launch your product idea, but also cuts down your trial and error time by providing you with an instant vehicle for feedback.

When launching any new venture, bootstrapping and thinking “out of the box” will be the keys to your success, at least in the beginning!