Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2011 during Spain’s economic crisis, which it refers to as “this crisis”.
As you may have noticed lately, we’re fully committed to spreading the word that diseases linked to poor eating habits are on the rise around the world.
Business is business, but as entrepreneurs we must never put the lives and health of thousands or millions of people at risk in order to make a profit. That’s why the business ideas we’re sharing today are related to health and wellbeing. Along the way, we’ll try to turn these new businesses into competition for the food industry.
More and more people are aware of the importance of eating natural foods and products. Preservatives and genetically modified products (foods derived from genetic modification) aren’t good for your health. I know it, you know it, the people who manufacture and produce them are aware of it, and millions of people know it too, but they have no alternative way to buy healthy products. The advantage of starting one of the businesses we’re about to suggest, besides being profitable, is that they could fall under the umbrella of socially responsible companies, so when it comes to getting financing, you might find some extra help.
1. Selling organic and natural products
Livestock
After mad cow disease, society realized the consequences of feeding animals artificial feed, chemicals and antibiotics, to name just a few of the hundreds of products used. The problem is that the fear of eating “artificial” or synthesized meat, or meat from animals raised on artificial products, lasted only as long as the news did. After that, everything went back to normal and people kept eating the same product that years earlier had caused mad cow disease.
I know there are farms run by less greedy entrepreneurs who bring meat, chorizo, morcilla (blood sausage) and all kinds of high-quality foods to market. These livestock farmers usually sell to private customers, who don’t mind paying a little more for a product they know is high quality and won’t carry the same risks as meat treated with… “nobody knows what”.
Without a doubt, these kinds of farmers run some of the most profitable businesses, because luxury restaurants tend to be their potential customers, in addition to private buyers. A good purchase for the restaurant, a good dinner for the customer, and health always comes first. Everybody wins. If there were more farmers like this, hospitals would need fewer staff.
Agriculture
As with livestock, the fruit and vegetables we eat, as a general rule, look excellent but are rotten. We discussed in a previous article where the properties of fruit are found. When a fruit is sprayed with more pesticide than necessary, it stops producing one of its most important properties, because it no longer needs to make it, and so it loses a large share of its benefits.
Society has pushed out the small farmer, to the point where they are forced to go through a middleman. Spain was a country where farming and livestock were profitable for business owners, until a kind of SGAE for farmers came along (a reference to Spain’s much-criticized copyright collecting society). Few farmers make money today, selling their produce to middlemen at laughable prices while it reaches the end customer at a premium.
Start an organic farming business and shout from the rooftops that your fruit and animals are completely natural. Society will thank you.
2. A business selling herbs and natural products
Ever since the pharmaceutical industry got into the herbalist business, mysteriously, plants now cure less. Herbalist shops should really be called “capsule shops” these days, because herbs are the last thing you’ll find there. Plants with excellent, proven healing properties, such as red clover, can no longer be found in Spain, because they’ve been turned into capsules.
In the past, a herbalist’s shop sold natural products; now we find packaged products with their corresponding preservatives and added artificial ingredients.
The business lies in turning the herbalist’s shop back into what it once was: a place to find natural products.
To start this business, we can do it the same way the first, traditional herbalists did. Get in touch with people around the world who know this market and can send you the herbs or plants. You can also contact a distributor that sells only plants and herbs in their natural state.
Set up your own herbalist’s shop with herbs in their pure state, open a website and tell people why they should buy from you. The business could compete perfectly well with the current franchises of this kind, as long as those keep selling artificial products as natural ones.
3. Help people lose weight naturally
There are two kinds of profitable businesses when it comes to weight. On one side is the industry that makes you gain weight with junk food and foods with added sugars. On the other is the industry that helps you lose it, either through surgery or with artificial products that are, frankly, harmful to your health. Around this business appear people like Dr. Dukan and his method, and then we see other entrepreneurs who run military-style boot camps to help people lose weight.
Whatever your business idea in this niche, it will be profitable, because within a few years more than 40% of the population is expected to be obese or to have problems related to cardiovascular disease.
When we wrote about the professions most in demand, we forgot to mention nutritionists, dietitians and the like, because these professionals are among those whose services have grown in demand during this crisis, along with personal trainers and practitioners of therapies such as yoga and tai chi. Let’s remember that getting away from stress is as important as eating habits. Here’s an example of another entrepreneur who had a good business idea focused on workplace health.
Finally, I’ve noticed that many dietitians and nutritionists have little contact with professionals in biological and naturopathic medicine, so it would be interesting for these professionals to work together, or at least to design exercise plans and diets not only for losing weight but also for preventing disease.
Any of these business ideas, once you’ve grasped the message we wanted to get across, will give added value to the client, the consumer and society.
Further reading
Featured image: Rexness, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}