My 7 Favorite Business Ideas This Week. Ep. #275

Chris Koerner (0:00)

All right, one week ago today, I posted this episode entitled 11 Business Ideas I'd Start If I Were a Beginner, and it crushed. You guys loved it. And I can do these types of episodes all day. These are just compilations of business or side hustle ideas that are approachable to everyone. So today, I wanted to cover seven different ideas, but all of them are in the food industry. They could be side hustles, they could be full-fledged, scalable businesses, take your pick. But going into 2026, these are my seven favorite food business ideas, starting with number seven and ending with my all-time favorite, number one.

Okay, my seventh favorite idea. All right, this one is not a food per se, but it's a product in the food industry and that's grills, outdoor grills that we cook on. I don't have a short or video to show this because this was actually a newsletter I wrote a while ago after doing a deep dive on the grill cleaning industry. Here are some notes from that newsletter so you don't have to spend seven minutes reading the whole thing. Okay, how many competitors are there in the grill cleaning business per million people? One. At least in Dallas Fort Worth, there are eight grill cleaning businesses and eight million people. Okay. Now, these are real statistics here. Seventy percent of Americans own a grill and there are 334 million Americans. But there are only 2.3 people per household so we have to account for that. Therefore, there are 142 million American households and right around 100 million of them have a grill. Okay. This includes mobile homes, apartments, single family homes, etc. Now, let's look at DFW. Okay. So I know most of you don't live in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, but that's okay because, demographically speaking, this Metroplex is representative of the entire United States. We've got a little bit of everything with regards to socio-economic status, racial diversity, etc. We've got urban areas, rural areas, etc. So there are 2.4 million households in the Dallas Fort Worth area. How many of them are going to pay 250 bucks to get their grill cleaned? That's about what this runs. And I know that's already what you're thinking. My grill costs 100 bucks at Lowe's. I'm not going to pay 250 to clean it. Chill out. Hold on that thought, okay? Let's say 10% of people would pay that. 250 Cool. That's 240,000 households. You think that's too generous? 1%.

Okay. 24,000 households. Cool? Cool. There's 8 businesses doing this. That's 3,000 households per business in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

If only 1% will pay for this, what's 3,000 households times $250? That's $750,000 a year. If you're working 6 days a week, then that's 10 grills a day. This isn't really an urgent service, so you have the flexibility to make routes, so you're not doing an hour of driving for each house. Now, one person could realistically not do 10 grills in a day. Let's say you have 3 people doing this. They're each doing 3.3 a day. Basically, your only cost is gas and labor. This could very easily be a 50% profit margin business, making the owner $375,000 a year, if only 1% of the market would pay for it. How do you find those people? Facebook ads, flyers, direct mail, Google ads, Google business profile, etc. What does Google Trends show for the phrase grill cleaning? Well, it's up and to the right. Slowly up and to the right. Of course, it's pretty seasonal. It peaks every June. This is for the entire United States. And if I look at Texas, it looks like even faster growth and less seasonal, of course, because it's a warmer market. You could make this way more efficient and profitable than just going to one house, cleaning everything, then going to the next house. You could go to all 10 houses in a day, pick up all the grates. You could leave them soaking overnight in some harsh chemicals, scrub them at like a thousand square foot shop, then bring them back and clean out the rest of the grill. So get out there and start a freaking grill cleaning business already. And if you want to read the full like long form newsletter about this, we'll link to it in the show notes. Oh, what could you upsell from this? Geez, where do you begin? Pressure washing, oven cleaning. You could sell grill tools. You could sell pizza ovens, pizza oven cleaning, outdoor kitchen deep cleaning. That's just your foot in the door is the grill cleaning. There's a zillion things you could upsell from this. If you're already rolling up with chemicals in a pressure washer anyway, then why not do the driveway, the sidewalk, the house, the roof, the gutters, the windows. Anyway, I love this business. And my sixth favorite idea. All right, here we go. This woman makes as much as a two week paycheck in four hours worth of work. But what she's doing is super unique, super profitable, it costs hardly anything to start. They're called mini pancakes or Dutch pancakes. She charges $12 to $14 for a serving. You can buy this same burner for this much. She sets up shop in her neighborhood on a busy street corner. It only takes a few minutes for her to assemble. OK, we're talking about mini pancakes, aka Dutch pancakes. You use a very specific appliance for this. You can buy them on Amazon for $1 to $700. They're unique. You kind of treat it like frozen yogurt, right? Where you make a base of these mini pancakes and then you can put fruit, chocolate, all kinds of toppings on it. You can charge between $10 and $15 for a serving. The profit margins are like 80% gross, 60% net if you're running it yourself, closer to 40% if you're hiring someone to do it for you. This girl on Instagram is just doing it in her front yard and she just posts to Facebook and Nextdoor and Instagram that she's going to be there for five hours on a Saturday morning. That's it. She doesn't have a retail spot. The Dutch name for these are Poffertjes. I think I'm saying that right. You can do it sweet, you can do it savory, think crepes. If you look at Amazon right now, I see one with five star reviews for $179. I see one for $78. These are cheap. What do Google Trends show? Well, it's very good. Up and to the right, virtually no one was searching for this before 2009, and now tons of people are. And my fifth favorite food idea. What if your next business was in the produce side? Well, let's break this one down real quick. This is David Blake. He sells high quality dehydrated oranges. He buys them for full retail at his local grocery store. This year, he made $50,000 in his part time. His most popular fruits are orange, pear, apple, lime. In that order, he's on track to make $100,000 in net profit next year. He started with one dehydrator. Now, he has 10 and he has no employees. So before you sprint to the comments and say stuff like, What about a food handling permit? Just remember that every single business has obstacles to overcome. All right. Why do I love this business? Because I love food. That's why this whole episode is about food businesses. And I would love to own a dehydrator. I think a lot of guys and gals out there would also love to own a dehydrator because it's cool and you can use it for yourself and you can monetize it. Produce is healthy. Healthy food is trending and it's not going to stop trending. This guy is making low six figures a year selling dehydrated oranges and apples and pears and whatever. And he started at a farmers market. This is approachable to almost everyone. Find a dehydrator that has a 30 to 60 day warranty, money back guarantee, play around with it. I just talked to a guy that I wasn't even planning on saying this. This morning, I spoke to a guy in Idaho that is buying colostrum from dairy farmers. What is colostrum? It's like breast milk, but more nutrient dense, high in protein, etc. So he buys colostrum from dairy farmers for $3.20 a gallon. He dehydrates it and then he sells it to other dairy farmers for $20 a pound. I've done the conversion, one gallon of colostrum nets out to about 2.5 pounds of dehydrated dried powdered colostrum. In other words, he pays $3.20 for a liquid colostrum, which gets him 2.5 pounds of powdered dried colostrum, and he's able to sell those 2.5 pounds for $46 to other dairy farmers. One cow needs about one pound of colostrum per year, so 100 cow operation needs 100 pounds a year, which is about $2,000 a year. And 100 cows on a dairy farm is not very much. That's a very small farm. That's how he's making money with a dehydrator. I wasn't even planning on talking about that idea with regards to this dehydrated fruit idea, but I just had that conversation like five hours ago. So whether you're buying a skid steer to do land clearing or a stump grinder to do stump grinding or a ditch witch or a backhoe, anything. I just love the idea of buying an asset that you can either rent out or use as the backbone of your business. And in this case, a dehydrator is that asset. Now I should clarify there is a difference between freeze dryers and dehydrators. Freeze dryers use vacuum-sealed subzero temperatures to remove like 99% of moisture, which can preserve food for up to 25 years. And it also has high nutrient retention, whereas dehydrators will remove like 80 to 95% of moisture and have like a 1 to 5 year shelf life. So dehydrators, not as expensive, but not as good. Freeze dryers, more expensive, but better. A freeze dryer is going to cost you between $2,000 and $5,000.