Turning an Idea into a Successful Business: The Teaching Case Study of Innofresh

Abstract

     Innofresh is a food processing small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in Thailand following an interesting combination of flexibility and customizability under the concept of ‘small enough to be flexible, big enough to fit standard’. The company started in 2003 and has significantly grown to become one of the top leading Thai SMEs in producing hot sauce, cold sauce, frozen sauce such as mayonnaise, sandwich spread, salad cream, syrup product, bakery filling, seafood sauce and cocktail sauce Innofresh has now gained recognition for supplying products to big multinational companies such as CP, Makro, Witwood Food Products, Newly Weds Foods, Inc., and Griffith Laboratories. Flexibility and standardization are big advantages of Innofresh in expanding its market to meet continuous rise in demand. With strong established customers along with high quality of product, Innofresh’s sales have grown at least 20% over the past three years, and tend to continue to increase in the future.  This case study provides a very good start to the discussion both internal and external factors such as Porter’s five force analysis, SWOT analysis.  The main concept for discussion questions and answers provide a broad overview of how external or internal factors affect the performance of food business and industry.