MFK has developed three types of fortified popped millet food snacks and peanut butter in a sachet that it hopes to distribute on the Haitian market. Regarding the popped millet: one is a sweetened product, the other salty, and a third product is a mixture of the two. The peanut butter is a plain creamy, partly hydrogenated product made from high-grade local peanuts and imported varieties. MFK now wishes to test the products with consumers and develop a business plan for marketing them. This research will contribute to the process.
The objectives of the research are to identify the most popular snack food products already on the Haitian market, understand the formal market distribution channels for snack foods, obtain a profile of turnover rates for snacks at the different distribution levels and a scaled profile of wholesale and retail prices for snack foods. With specific reference to popped millet snacks, MFK wants to know distribution costs, recommended distributors, recommended sale price, customer preferred quantities per purchase, and distributor and customer-preferred packaging. The study also provides an estimation of market size for both peanut butter packets and popped millet.
A common characteristic of peanut butter and popped millet is that they are traditionally artisanal products. This might be an advantage for popped millet because the major competition—popcorn— is homemade, sold in unsealed bags, and is not fortified. The same can be said of peanut butter, although peanut butter used as a spread is sometimes de facto given away free as an inducement to bread sales, a factor that may limit the sales of single-serving packets.
