Launching your products in the international market

There are many strategies you can choose if you want to launch your product(s) in the international market. Most of them are probably wrong and the right strategy definitely depends on the product.

What is probably more important than your product, yes, we all have the best product, but still, if quality is what is required to succeed, how come Starbucks and McDonald's have succeeded better than most?

It's not only about the quality

That shouldn't be a big surprise to anyone. Success is only about being prepared when an opportunity presents itself. If you have the right contacts, mingle in the right circles, then opportunities will be presented more often.

If you don't have the contacts; well, then you have to find some.

Two ways to get the right contacts

The most expensive way to get contacts may be exhibiting at an international trade fair, but if you have the money, you're likely to find some.

If you don't have the money, or don't want to use the money you have to, if you want to exhibit at a big international exhibition, well then you have to see if you can find someone willing to help you, or cooperate with you.

On our website we have posted pages about international launch and international exhibitions. You may find them interesting if you plan on operating in an international market.

Why make a good product even better?

Our Amazon Secret fruit snack was one of our most popular products at the Anuga fair, the World's largest trade-show, in October (2013). Most visitors found the fact that it's a very good tasting natural product(s), with vitamins, antioxidants and minerals to be very interesting.

It's a product you can eat as it is, use on, to spice up, your breakfast cereals, your yogurt, your ice cream or in a salad.

Can it be better than this?
 While we were talking with potential buyers, importers from many countries, the Research & Development department was working to make this one of the World's most healthy snacks and cereals. By adding fructoologosaccarides (FOS) - and today we were notified that it went well. The product have a new USP.

Fructooligosaccarides, what is it?
There are several types; Inulin is one of them, but the one we used is made from sugar. I'm sure many will ask how sugar can be healthy. Well, this sugar, made from cane juice, isn't like other sugars. Due to a fermentation process, the molecules are locked, making it impossible for your body to absorb the calories, but your good bacteria, in your digestion system love this fiber and it's one of the main reasons eating fruit is healthy. That is, beside the fact that fruits contains vitamins, minerals and sometimes antioxidants.

What happens when you eat it?
Actually many things, but most of what happens we are not allowed to tell you because of the new European regulations for what you can, and what you can't say about a product. Well, anyway, it's well documented, so we don't have to take it back if we do say it. The FOS we use in the new super snack will, if you eat 1 gram of it, increase your Calcium absorption with 13%, within 12 hours.

You can read more about FOS on our Bodyshield site: http://www.bodyshield.no/prebiotic_fibers_FOS.asp

If you want more information about our Super Snack, please visit our web-site: http://sorze4.com/en/amazing_super_snack.asp

So, to answer the initial question; why make a good product better? Because it's better for you!

Fruit Snack, Fruit Cereal... what is it?

During the year, we see many new products, but new, only a handful is what we call new. Most are a variation or copies of other existing products. Well, if we were targeting the low end of the market we could sit at home, browse on the Internet and find many, but instead, we travel, visit innovative new companies with unique products.

Well, usually there is no person who is the only one who have an idea, so of course, it could happen that someone else also made the same product, but as long as the other isn't in the market, it's no problem.

This summer we found this great fruit snack, or cereal, or to use on ice creams, in yogurts, or in salads.

The new Amazon Secret product

We loved this crunchy fruit snack and decided to implement the products in our Amazon Secret line.

More information available on our web-site: http://sorze4.com/en/amazing_super_snack.asp

This product will be exhibited at Anuga 2013. Hall 7.1 G109 (The World's largest food show)

What your Coffee says about you!

Can it really? Say something about your personality?

Espresso

Double Espresso

Triple Espresso

Mocha

Latte

Cappuccino

Macchiato

Iced Coffee

Americano

Frappuccino

Coffee-to-Go

Filter Coffee

French Press

Decaf

Instant Coffee

Expresso

Find your personality

New brochures Amazon Secret & Sorze4

Our brochures for the Anuga fair in Cologne, Germany, Oct. 5-10 is available for download from our web-site: http://sorze4.com/en/index.html

In them you can see the products we will be exhibiting at Anuga, and some we're not.

Our boots are finised designed and will look like this:

If you're going there, please feel free to visit us and taste our products! We hope to see you there!

Edible Coffee - Does it exist?

When drinking Coffee, the bitter aftertaste is easily recognizable, and even though it smells delicious, very few actually like to eat the coffee beans.

Cocoa beans, even though the fruit is very different and have many beans in one fruit, while the Coffee is more like a Cherry, the beans inside looks a little similar.

You don't get the butter, like the one you get from the Cocoa, but Coffee contains oil, so mixing Coffee oil, with grinned Coffee, well, I don't think anyone tried that, before now.

It's made from 100% Arabica. Looks like a Chocolate, but doesn't contain any Cocoa*. Comes in 3 flavors. People like different types of Coffee, so why not? Espresso, Cappuccino and Cafe Latte... just like the Coffee drink it's named after, the edible Coffee Bean contains Caffeine... the same amount as a cup of Coffee of the type it's named after have.

*The Cafe Latte flavored bean have a little Cocoa.

Available with and without Sugar.

Read more about this product on our web-site: http://sorze4.com/en/edible_coffee_beans.asp

See who opens your e-mails

It's possible to request a confirmation, to know if the receivers opens your e-mails, if you are using MS Outlook, or other e-mail software, but you will not get a confirmation if the receiver don't accept to give it to you. And even if they do, you don't know if they click on links you have in your e-mail.

Basically; you only get a confirmation informing you that the e-mail did arrive in the e-mail client.

Well, it's possible to Track email opens and clicks directly from Gmail, Outlook and Salesforce.

You can download Signals here: http://www.getsignals.com/

Snap.Do almost made me Snap - How to remove it

I did, several times, follow instructions from helpful internet users, but it did always, somehow, pop up after a few days. Being hijacked by this annoying "tool" is something that could make you "snap", so they did pick the right name for it.

After trying it manually, something that didn't work, maybe because I didn't do all I should have done, probably because I didn't have the patience because I was irritated, then I tried different software tools promising to find malware for free... well, they did find, but didn't remove before I was willing to pay.

OK, most things have a cost, but virus software like Avast is free, so why not a Snap.Do remover tool? After "betting on a lot of horses" I did find a free tool and it seems it has done the job; Malwarebytes - so if it prove that it did the job, I will consider buying the Pro version.

If your web-site was a country...

How big would it be?

Many use hours every day, to improve and make their web-site as good as possible, but is it worth it? How many are we doing it for? How big is it?

Perspective
We're not using time on our web-site every day and for us the purpose isn't to get as many visitors as possible. It's to get the information out to our contacts, and hopefully, rarely since the group we target are very small, we try to find new contacts.

I guess this is how you have to see things if you have a site: Everything is relative to your target group, it's not to be considered or compared to all Internet users. Same as if you have a store; you want the buyers to visit you, all the others don't create much income for you, with a small exception of the "word of mouth" effect.

Comparing to countries
I found a site that compares web-sites to places, and countries. We're not targeting all of the users on the Internet, but I thought it would be fun to compare our site: sorze4.com with a country.

This service, site: siteempires.com, informed me that our site is a little bigger than Cocos (Keeling) Islands and have a population of 616. A little bigger than Ådalsbruk is a village in the municipality of Løten, Norway.

What I didn't know, even though I'm Norwegian and my wife have the same last name, is that the famous painter, Edvard Munch was born there in 1863.

Well, being small isn't always a bad thing so I'm not disappointed that we can't compare ourselves with Facebook, larger than Italy, or Twitter, larger than Azerbaijan.

We have 5% compared to our local newspaper and we're OK with that :)

Catalog - June 2013

Our catalog for selected products is available online.

It shows new products available from sorze4 AS. For more information about the products, please visit our web-site.

In the catalog you will find: breakfast cereals, edible coffee, instant coffee, frozen juice bars (sorbet), fruit and cereal bars, wild rice, hot & sweet chili sauce, Amazon Secret (functional rainforest drinks), Bodyshield (next generation functional drinks), Pop'd Kerns and biodegradable cups.

Edible Coffee - What is it?

There are many types of Coffee, to drink, but what if you really want a cup of coffee and are far away from coffee shops, or other places where you can have your hot, or cold coffee.

The solution is edible coffee. Coffee to eat. Maybe you think it can't taste good, but actually, if you mix it with a little cocoa and sugar, it's a good alternative when you can't drink it. 

It's good to eat even when it's not a replacement for coffee. We have tested it on people who don't drink coffee, so in our opinion; it's a very good product.

Each bean comes with the same amount of energy, as you would get if you did drink an Espresso, a Cappuccino, or a Cafe Latte.

Read more about it on our web-site.

Leave your comfort zone

Enter your panic zone

SPAM 0 - ME 1

Every morning and throughout the day, unwanted advertising is sent to my e-mail address. Like most people, I have better things to do than to sit and delete unwanted mail.

In MS Outlook, if you have the patience to set up enough rules to filter out the spam, it's possible to get rid of most of the spam, but that's in Outlook. The spam is still there when I read my e-mail on my mobile phone.

A good solution
I spent an evening studying spam software. Many seemed good for the PC, but my big problem is when I read the e-mail on the mobile phone.

One of few that solved the problem was Digimark DesktopOne. It was easy to set it up to scan the mail on the server and then, also mobile phone was free of spam. Of course, I have to leave my computer on to solve this, but since it is on when I'm not sleeping, it's not a problem.

Digimark DesktopOne can be downloaded from http://www.cloudmarkdesktop.com/en/home

One free version, for one mail account only, but if you set it up to scan the server, not the mail client on your computer, it's will do the job, if your problem is the mobile phone.

With the Pro version you can scan as many accounts as you need to. POP3, IMAP, Google Mail, Yahoo and others.