Ordering healthy school lunches online

By ELLEN READ

It's tough waiting for feedback after putting your small business idea out there in the public domain.

What will people think? Who will pick up on the idea? How many customers will you get?

Parnell entrepreneur Stephen Moon is waiting for responses to these questions at the moment after launching his venture - Tuckshop - last week.

His internet firm Tuckshop.co.nz has developed a service that allows parents to order and pay for their children's school lunches online.

Information has been sent to the country's 2700 schools and Moon says the initial feedback has been very positive.

However, the wheels of institutions grind slowly and it's tough waiting for the various boards and committees to discuss the venture.

Moon sees three main advantages in the system. First, parents have greater control over what their children eat and healthy diets can be actively encouraged. Second, there is a lot less administration required for tuckshops and schools. And, for the first time, it ensures that lunch money is spent on lunches and not other items.

Moon also sees the system being expanded to apply to school trips, stationery purchases, school fees, uniforms, and in other areas.

"What this will do is greatly increase the efficiency of school administrations, and allow schools to take advantage of technology to streamline their operations. In the internet age, such services are fast becoming a necessity," he said.

The venture has been funded solely from Moon's savings as he says there are not many grants available in the IT/tech area.

He puts this down to Government nervousness about the intangible nature of the business.

Tuckshop.co.nz is a website which will host a page for any school signing up (at a cost of $375 a year). The school has total freedom over the page: it can design and update it as it wishes and also link it to the school website.

The kicker is that each page also has space for one advertiser, so in theory the venture need not cost the school anything at all if they sell the ad space.

For this reason, Moon says he is marketing the idea to schools as a profit rather than cost centre.

The e-commerce side of the business has been bank approved - albeit slowly due to the lack of information front-line staff had - and set up by a contractor for Moon.

"It would cost around $10,000 for a school to do its own site and around $250 to maintain each year," Moon explains.

He hopes to have the first schools on board in a couple of weeks and is targeting a 10 per cent (or 270 schools) response rate in 12-18 months.

Moon came up with the idea in June and then spent several months researching and costing it. He has done this on his own, without the help of business advisers.

The hardest things have been how much longer things take than expected and the frustration of getting incomplete or incorrect information from people.

"But what's motivated me to get the idea off the ground is the vision of what it can be," Moon said.

He has ideas and plans for other applications of the idea but is not ready to reveal them yet. However, they too revolve around small businesses - an area which has been typically excluded from e-commerce because of the costs involved.

Plus, says Moon, it pays to keep the ideas to himself for the time being because the intellectual property is hard to protect.

"My only protection is being first to market and being good."

www.tuckshop.co.nz