Food & Beverage Scenario Help

[corygehr]

Hey folks,

I'm semi-new to Capitalism Lab. I've completed the first few scenarios and now I'm onto Food & Beverage and could use guidance - I'm struggling with this one.

I noticed my CEO starts this scenario with expertise in 'Snacks' so my starting strategy is to build a bunch of Convenience Stores due to their low cost and utilizing Snack products from Seaports (preferring my starting city but importing others where necessary). I might build and max out one R&D center to research something like Ice Cream and begin distribution, scaling up as necessary to handle demand and eventually reaching other cities.

I feel like I'm taking a long time to expand into other cities and my product line; the scenario asks you to reach brand dominance in Snacks, Beverages, and Food with a $300M market cap. It seems I lose my dominance and market cap quickly, even if I have the highest quality Snacks. I do think part of my problem is struggling to keep up with demand; even if I start raising prices, eventually a competitor enters the market and cuts their prices to where I have to lower mine and my profit margins suffer. I think foods are generally a low margin but high-volume business to begin with.

Part of my problem is with Farming. Many of the snacks require Strawberries and I struggle to supply a sufficient number through the entire year. I've tried compensating with larger farms and warehousing those to keep supply when the farms exhaust their inventory for the season. Spinning up a new Farm appears to be very costly until they begin selling product. Still, I've tried to maximize training because the major tip I've seen for this scenario is to start farms early and max training to improve quality faster.

I also try to hire a strong CMO early in the game to get more brand quality points. This seems to work in the early stages of the scenario but later has a lower impact due to the competition.

One thought I'm going to try in my next New Game on this scenario is to spread production across multiple cities rather than consolidating in one place; ideally this would reduce freight costs. I'm not sure if with food products it's smarter to produce each product in each city or if there's some way to reduce freight costs.

Any other useful tips for finishing this scenario? In general my companies seem to grow at a much slower pace than the AI. Again, I'm learning so maybe I'll figure that out with more time and patience. In most cases I start with a bunch of Department Stores to get cashflow before going into my target market. I generally use the Range Brand strategy.

Thanks in advance!

[CapitalismLabStory]

Hi, so I started playing the game again after a year or so so it was my second time and my attempt at this one was horrible

I forgot to do R&D I also did very poorly at the start and ended up basically losing most of the starting capital to only recover it and by then it was an uphill battle (or still is).

I decided to do a YouTube series on it and boy it's been disastrous so far 11 episodes in and I've almost given up so I've moved on to Real Estate one (doing better as I remember the tricks better).

The lessons I learnt are:
1. Try to always do R&D for your products, if you plan on starting a new product then possibly invest in the tech beforehand. I was with around 8 products and because of forgetting about R&D I was already behind. I did buy tech from some but others refuse to sell.

2. Don't waste money you can't waste, I don't hire CMO or CTO mainly because I end up setting the marketing budget in bulk myself.

3. Which brings to this point, advertise from day 1 and use the range one. I believe you are so it will help.

4. One trick I like to do is to always use up a product to manufacture everything it can. So if you start with strawberry then make everything strawberry.

5. A mistake I made (again because I forgot the game) was not checking all seaports, there were quite a few and at the start of the game they sell everything you need to start your Food & Bev empire.

6. But don't be too dependent on them because I thought they were permanent until they weren't

7. I would advise you to train high at least your farms for sure because when the ports bring in goods your competitors will produce using them and you will be screwed in quality. So make your own farm and use those products.

I hope it helps

As I mentioned those are just a few things I think that it could have helped me if I had remembered them.

8. Last one, get a discount megastore at the start to sell items from the port. These stores give you profit and will carry you, at the start my store was making around 20% profit I think.

9. Last I promise I picked up a new thing, use Real Estate to have fixed income. Look at the city that needs appartment and plant one in. Start at 95% of market rate then bring to 100% when your occupancy is high. Pretty soon if you have a few of these you will be able to generate consistent income.

Hope it helps

[CapitalismLabStory]

Thank you appreciate it