When your company joins the Tennessee Specialty Food Association, TSFA, you are making a small investment with tremendous potential for growing your business, reducing your costs, and helping you SEE new opportunities. Here is an overview:

Our Member Network

• Thirty members strong and growing, many of whom have been in business for 10 plus years
• All of our members have their own supplier network and can be a resource for you, purchasing items from cartons, jars, food products, health insurance, and etc.
• All of our members have experience dealing with consumers, wholesalers, and many sell to distributors.
• Our management conversations range broadly from: internet insights, credit question about customers, who has better pricing or print quality, what should a production manager earn, and etc.
• To help facilitate communications within the network we offer message board capability to help you solve your business needs. The topics vary from: Equipment available for sale/purchase; industry questions (FDA, PTO), marketing, helpful web links to other associations and related business programs.
• We have a well established relation with the University of Tennessee, Department of Food Science & Technology. They work with various government and private sectors to facilitate training and overall education. As a member you can ask Dr. Bill Morris your specific questions and discuss business issues.
• The Tennessee Department of Agriculture, The Market Development Division team will help to identify business opportunities and help all our business grow. Most recent projects include Marriott Hotels, Food Lion and a proposal with the Foodnetwork.
• If you are new to the food specialty industry this is the way to ensure you can be successful with access to knowledgeable and friendly folks!!

Our Website (How we generate member revenue):

• If you join for no other reason, our site will generate traffic to your website. Our key words are sent to over 1500 search engines on a monthly basis.
• Our site is designed to be a directory for consumers interested in specialty foods from Tennessee. Every one of members benefits from this exposure.
• In the coming months we will be devoting a large part of our overall resources to the marketing of the site.
• Many of our members reported a significant increase in their own company's site traffic after we went live in November 2001.
• The site strategy is simple, consumers prefer going to one site to see many things, before going to our individual company's site to buy our products.

Saving Money for our Members

• We have established several committee's to identify opportunities for reducing material costs and other business expenses.
• Retailers may realize additional savings from our food producers and suppliers.
• Our combined buying power in the July Fancy Food advertising campaign allowed our participates to realize a 66% reduction in cost.
• At a recent Leadership meeting at the Gossick Leadership Center members received excellent training at a 300% cost savings.
• Our strategy is to leverage our total purchasing power as an association of small businesses.

If you would like to discuss joining TSFA, please call me at 931.294.5906 or email me at brad@tsfagourmet.com. I look forward to speaking with you.

Brad Simmons - Bell Buckle Country Store
President
TSFA