7 Low-Cost Business Ideas for Beginners in 2026
In this solo‑talk episode Chris Koerner walks beginner entrepreneurs through seven food‑related side‑hustle concepts that require minimal upfront capital and can be launched quickly. He starts with a data‑driven deep‑dive into the grill‑cleaning market, showing how a handful of households willing to pay $250 per service can generate six‑figure revenues with only gas, labor and a few cleaning tools. He then moves to a portable Dutch‑pancake (mini‑pancake) stand, highlighting the low cost of the specialized griddle, 80 % gross margins and the power of hyper‑local social‑media promotion. The third segment explores dehydrated fruit and colostrum freeze‑drying businesses, comparing inexpensive home‑grade dehydrators ($50‑$100) to industrial freeze‑dryers ($2‑$5 k) and illustrating profit potential through real‑world examples. Koerner briefly promotes his own email‑list platform, Beehive, as a resilient sales channel when social media disappears. He follows with a luxury picnic‑experience service that leverages rented vans, Instagram reels and targeted ad boosts to command $400‑$700 per event without needing a food‑handler permit. The fifth idea is a frozen‑grape snack sold in premium packaging, showing how simple product re‑packaging can yield 2‑5× price multiples. He then presents an “honor‑system” bakery stand that operates on a trust‑based QR/ Venmo payment model, arguing that low theft rates make it profitable. Koerner expands on the psychology of reciprocity, suggesting free coffee/muffins to generate future sales. Finally, he dives into three watermelon‑centric concepts – stick‑on‑a‑stick popsicles, watermelon‑bread sandwiches and blended watermelon slushies – each with ultra‑low ingredient cost and high markup. Throughout, he intersperses market statistics, profit calculations, marketing tactics (Facebook/Google ads, flyers, Instagram reels, direct mail), scalability notes, and personal anecdotes, urging viewers to test ideas quickly, iterate, and leverage community platforms like tkowners.com for support.
Chapters
All right, one week ago today, I posted this episode entitled 11 Business Ideas. I'd start if I were a beginner. And it crushed you guys. Loved it. And I can do these types of episodes all day. These are just compilations of business or side hustle ideas that are approachable to everyone. So today I wanted to cover seven different ideas, but all of them are in the food industry. They could be side hustles, they could be full fledged scalable businesses. Take your pick. But going into 2026, these are my seven favorite food business ideas, starting with number seven and ending with my all time favorite number one. Okay, my seventh favorite idea. All right, this one is not a food per se, but it's a product in the food industry. And that's grills, outdoor grills that we cook on. I don't have a short or video to show this because this was actually a newsletter I wrote a while ago after doing a deep dive on the grill cleaning industry. Here are some notes from that newsletter so you don't have to spend seven minutes reading the whole thing. Okay, how many competitors are there in the grill cleaning business per million people? One, at least. In Dallas Fort Worth, there are eight grill cleaning businesses and 8 million people. Okay, now these are real statistics here. 70% of Americans own a grill, and there are 334 million Americans. But there are only 2.3 people per household. So we have to account for that. Therefore, there are 142 million American households and right around 100 million of them have a grill. Okay? This includes mobile homes, apartments, single family homes, et cetera. Now, let's look at dfw. Okay, so I know most of you don't live in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, but that's okay, because demographically speaking, this Metroplex is representative of the entire United States. We've got a little bit of everything with regards to socioeconomic status, racial diversity, etc. We've got urban areas, rural areas, et cetera. So there are 2.4 million households in the Dallas Fort Worth area. How many of them are going to pay 250 bucks to get their grill cleaned? That's about what this runs. And I know that's already what you're thinking. My grill cost 100 bucks at Lowe's. I'm not going to pay 250 to clean it. Chill out. Hold on that thought. Okay, let's say 10% of people would pay that 250. Cool. That's 240,000 households. You think that's too generous? 1%. Okay, 24,000 households. Cool. Cool. There's eight businesses doing this. That's 3,000 households per business in the Dallas Fort Worth area. If only 1% will pay for this, what's 3,000 households times $250? That's $750,000 a year. If you're working six days a week, then that's 10 grills a day. This isn't really an urgent service. So you have the flexibility to make routes so you're not doing an hour of driving for each house. Now, one person could realistically not do 10 grills in a day. Let's say you have three people doing this. They're each doing 3.3 a day. Basically your only cost is gas and labor. This could very easily be a 50% profit margin business making the owner $375,000 a year if only 1% of the market would pay for it. How do you find those people? Facebook ads, flyers, direct mail, Google Ads, Google business profile, et cetera. What does Google trends show for the phrase grill cleaning? Well, it's up and to the right. Slowly up and to the right. Of course, it's pretty seasonal. It peaks every June. This is for the entire United States. And if I look at Texas, it looks like even faster growth and less seasonal. Of course, because it's a warmer market. You could make this way more efficient and profitable than just going to one house, cleaning everything, then going to the next house. You could go to all, all 10 houses in a day, pick up all the grates. You can leave them soaking overnight in some harsh chemicals, scrub them at like a thousand square foot shop, then bring them back and clean out the rest of the grill. So get out there and start a freaking grill cleaning business already. And if you want to read the full, like long form newsletter about this, we'll link to it in the show notes. Oh, what could you upsell from this? Geez, where do you begin pressure washing? Oven cleaning. You could sell grill tools. You could could sell pizza ovens, pizza oven cleaning, outdoor kitchen, deep cleaning. That's just your foot in the door is the grill cleaning. There's a zillion things you could upsell from this. If you're already rolling up with chemicals and a pressure washer anyway, then why not do the driveway, the sidewalk, the house, the roof, the gutters, the windows. Anyway, I love this business. Real quick. Please subscribe to my channel. I know it's kind of lame to ask, but it means a lot. Thanks. And my 6th favorite idea. All right, here we go. This woman makes as much as a Two week paycheck in four hours worth of work. But what she's doing is super unique, super profit. It costs hardly anything to start. They're called mini pancakes or Dutch pancakes. She charges 12 to $14 for a serving. You can buy this same burner for this much. She sets up shop in her neighborhood or on a busy street corner. It only takes a few minutes for her to assemble. Okay, we're talking about mini pancakes, AKA Dutch pancakes. You use a very specific appliance for this. You can buy them on Amazon for one to seven hundred dollars. They're unique. You kind of treat it like frozen yogurt, right? Where you make a base of these mini pancakes and then you can put fruit, cheese, chocolate, all kinds of toppings on it. You can charge between 10 and $15 for a serving. The profit margins are like 80% gross, 60% net if you're running it yourself, closer to 40% if you're hiring someone to do it for you. This girl on Instagram is just doing it in her front yard and she just posts to Facebook and next door and Instagram that she's going to be there for five hours on a Saturday morning. That's it. She doesn't have a retail spot. The Dutch name for these are poverty. I think I'm saying that right. You can do it sweet, you can do it savory. Think crepes. If you look at Amazon right now, I see one with five star reviews for one 79 bucks. I see one for 78 bucks. These are cheap. What a Google trends show. Well, it's very good up and to the right. Virtually no one was searching for this before 2009 and now tons of people are. And my fifth favorite food idea, what if your next business was in the produce aisle? Well, let's break this one down real quick. This is David Blake. He sells high quality dehydrated oranges. He buys them for full retail at his local grocery store. This year he made $50,000 in his part time. His most popular fruits are orange, pear, apple, lime, in that order. He's on Track to make $100,000 in net profit next year. He started with one dehydrator, now he has 10 and he has no employees. So before you sprint to the comments and say stuff like, what about a food handling permit? Just remember that every single business has obstacles to overcome. All right, why do I love this business? Because I love food. That's why. This whole episode is about food businesses and I would love to own a dehydrator. I think A lot of guys and gals out there would also love to own a dehydrator because it, it's cool and you can use it for yourself and you can monetize it. Produce is healthy, healthy food is trending and it's not going to stop trending. This guy is making low six figures a year selling dehydrated oranges and apples and pears and whatever. And he started at a farmer's market. This is approachable to almost everyone. Find a dehydrator that has a 30 to 60 day warranty money back guarantee. Play around with it. I just talked to a guy that I wasn't even planning on saying this this morning. I spoke to a guy in Idaho that is buying colostrum from dairy farmers. What is colostrum? It's like breast milk, but more nutrient dense, high in protein, et cetera. So he buys colostrum from dairy farmers for $3.20 a gallon, he dehydrates it and then he sells it to other dairy farmers for $20 a pound. And I've done the conversion. One gallon of colostrum nets out to about 2.5 pounds of dehydrated dried powdered colostrum. So in other words, he pays $3.20 for liquid colostrum, which gets him 2.5 pounds of powdered dried colostrum. And he's able to sell those 2.5 pounds for $46 to other dairy farmers. One cow needs about one pound of colostrum per year. So 100 cow operation needs a hundred pounds a year, which is about $2,000 a year. And 100 cows on a dairy farm is not very much. That's a very small farm. That's how he's making money with a dehydrator. Okay, I wasn't even planning on talking about that idea with regards to this dehydrated fruit idea, but I just had that conversation like five hours ago. So whether you're buying a skid steer to do land clearing or a stump grinder to do stump grinding, or a ditch witch or a backhoe, anything, I just love the idea of buying an asset that you can either rent out or use as the backbone of your business. And in this case, a dehydrator is that asset. Now I should clarify. There is a difference between freeze dryers and dehydrators. Freeze dryers use vacuum sealed sub zero temperatures to remove like 99% of moisture, which can preserve food for up to 25 years. And it also has high nutrient retention, whereas dehydrators will remove like 80 to 95% of moisture and have like a one to five year shelf life. So dehydrators not as expensive but not as good. Freeze dryer is more expensive but better. A freeze dryer is going to cost you between 2 and $5,000 and a dehydrator you can buy for as little as 50 bucks if you want to mess around with some jerky on Amazon. And a dehydrator will only run you about 50 bucks on Amazon if you want to mess around with some jerky. Or you can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a bigger or more commercial version. But a lot of these businesses rely on freeze dryers and not just dehydrators. So please take note of the difference there. And I should clarify the colostrum business I spoke about. They are using a freeze dryer and not a dehydrator for that. Real quick guys, I want to tell you how I made money within an hour of having an idea. This is an idea I got during a half marathon and all it took to launch this idea was one email to my list. That email brought in almost $3,000 in the first 24 hours with no ads, no social media, and no algorithm. So what happened is that Meta, AKA Facebook banned my Facebook page out of nowhere. All of my followers content, everything gone overnight. And Facebook is also where most of my newsletter subscribers come from. So I've been pretty mad to say the least. But nothing can touch my Beehive email list. Over a quarter million people I can reach whenever I want directly with nothing standing between me and their inbox. So what did I do? I ran home at Mile 8, opened Beehive and started selling a digital product to my subscribers that exact same day. You see, Beehive lets you sell right on the platform where no separate storefront, no extra tools, and they take zero commission on any of it. Every dollar is yours. Social media can disappear overnight, but your email list will not. So go to beehive.com Chris and use code CHRIS30 for 30% off your first three months. That's B E-E-H-I-I-.com Chris time for my fourth favorite food idea. Okay, here we go. She charges 440 bucks for this service and it takes her about two hours of work and her equipment, it does not cost that much. Here's how you do this. You start offering it for free. You document everything you're doing on Instagram. Then you start charging for it. And as you get too busy, you keep upping the price she's offering luxury picnic experiences. She doesn't need to own the land. She can use paid ads. If her organic stuff doesn't convert, well, she just needs a van and some equipment to rent out over and over and over. Okay, so if you're listening on audio, what we're looking at here is a woman that arranges luxury picnics in public places. She doesn't own land. Right. She'll, she'll go to a park. She'll go to a pond or a lake or national park. She'll set up a cute little table, a rug, food plates, silverware, et cetera. And she charges 440 bucks, 700 bucks, depends on the packages. Sometimes there's more expensive ingredients, but it's a lot of money and it's very scalable. You don't even need to own a van. You could rent a van. You could rent a trailer or a U Haul truck or something, a Home Depot truck. And she finds all of her customers for free organically, with short form videos or time lapse videos or well edited videos just posted organically. And then once you have a video do really well. You just go to Instagram, you click boost and you type in the zip codes that you want to boost it in so you don't waste it on people that could never be your customer. And that video will be shown over and over to 25 to 55 year old couples in your local area. In most cases, you shouldn't need like a food handler's permit. You don't need a caterer or a chef. It's mostly like fruit, vegetables, sandwiches, hummus, stuff like that. It's just a date. It's a way for couples to get out. And my wife and I will go to nice restaurants on Saturday night for date night and we'll easily drop three to five hundred bucks on a really nice dinner. And we would prefer many times to do something like this. We can get outside, we can do something different. And I just think people are going to want to get outside more and more. Okay, now here is my third favorite food idea. He's in hundreds of grocery stores selling the dumbest idea ever and making bank. But before I tell you what he's doing, I want you to remember this phrase, you can just do things. This guy takes something that costs two bucks, puts it in fancy packaging and sells it for eight to ten bucks. Everyone told him, that's not a business, that's a snack. He ignored him. He did it anyway. You can just do things. Same product, different framing. It's a healthy alternative. Processed junk food. I'd buy it. What is it? Frozen grapes in Ben and Jerry's type containers. And he sells them for 2-5x what you can get normal grapes for. So stop overthinking because you can just do things. All right, so I like this idea less because it's less approachable. There's only so many people that can launch this exact business because he's selling in grocery stores. But what's stopping you from selling this from a booth, from a cart at a farmer's market, to friends and family, etc. But I don't want to dive into that. I'd rather dive into the framework here that I kind of touch on in the video, that it sometimes pays to be ignorant or naive to not be smart. Here's a true story to illustrate this framework for you. It's called the Marshmallow Challenge, and it's not the Marshmallow Challenge. You may be thinking of where they put two marshmallows in front of a kid, and they say, hey, if you wait 15 minutes, you can have both of these. But if you eat one now, then you only get one. That's a different Marshmallow Challenge. Okay, this one is a true story where they took a room filled with executives, lawyers, business school graduates, et cetera, and then they took a room full of kids, and they asked both groups separately to do the same task. What is that task? Well, here are 20 sticks of raw spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one large marshmallow. What do you do? You have 18 minutes to build the tallest freestanding building possible. But the catch is the marshmallow has to be on top. Right? It has to be on top of your building. So what did the executives do? They only had 18 minutes. Well, they started off by, like, jockeying for power. They decide, all right, who's going to do this? Who's going to be the strategist? Who's going to be the leader? Let's come up with a design for this perfect structure. Let's talk about weight distribution, structural integrity, design. They spent 15 of the 18 minutes planning, building a tall, elegant structure, et cetera. And then they had two minutes to actually put the marshmallow on top. But guess what? The weight of the marshmallow caused the entire structure to fall, to collapse. So they spent their last 30 seconds panicking, trying to rebuild, restructure, and at the end of it, they didn't even have a tower to show for it. What did the kids do? Well, they didn't have a meeting. They didn't plan out roles and assignments. They just started shoving sticks of spaghetti into the marshmallow to see what would happen. They used failure as their data. The thing kept falling over, over and over. Didn't care. They grabbed more spaghetti. They tried something else. They stuck it over here instead of over there. By the time the adults were halfway through their meeting, the kids had already built six different structures. Granted, none of them worked very well, but they so much more real life data. Not theoretical data, but real life data based on their own testing. So they did this experiment with multiple groups of kids and executives. And what was the final result? The average height of the kids structures was 26 inches and the average height of the adult structures was 10 inches. So what do you do? You just do things. You just fail fast, you fail small. Okay, so do I expect a hundred people listening to this to go start competing frozen grapes businesses that sells into grocery stores just like this guy? Absolutely not. But from this specific idea, I want you to take a more broad generalized takeaway. Because this guy, I just know this guy. If he would have went out and got 50 opinions on this product or service, he would have had 47 people tell him this is dumb. This is stupid. There's no value add to taking grapes and putting them in a freezer and then putting them in different packaging. There's no value to that. People can freeze their own grapes. Dude, are you stupid? That's what they would have told him and that would have been logical, but it didn't matter. I don't even know if he asked them for feedback or not, or if he just did it. But either he ignored the feedback or he just did it without soliciting feedback. And for that reason, he is in thousands of grocery stores and he's objectively successful. He not only does grapes, but he does mangoes, strawberries, blueberries, etc. And my second favorite food idea, which has three different concepts to it. This is genius. She opened an on your honor bakery stand with mostly sourdough items. What do I mean by on your honor? It means that no one is attending it. People have to pay with a QR code or on Venmo and they could steal it if they want, but she is making out like a bandit. And why? Because people are good. And the small percentage of people that steal from her don't even come close to what it would cost her to hire someone and put them in that booth all day. It's a net win. It's genius. And we are going to start seeing more of this. So you can look at the world as if, oh, people are so crooked. The world's getting worse every day. I would never do this. And you'll be sad and you'll see in the world what you think it already is. Or you could be an optimist and say, I'm going to do this because I can make a profit and I think people are good. And guess what? I'll do you one more. If you look right here, right outside my window, you see that little mini fridge on my front porch? We've done the same thing. My wife makes cookie bars and they're amazing. And she puts them in a mini fridge on her front porch and she's never been stolen from. Guys, I hate to break it to you, but you're not very likely to actually start a business based on something you see or hear on this podcast unless you spend a little more time with me and with other people that are doing just that. So come check out TK owners. That's tkowners.com where hundreds of people are launching, starting, testing, experimenting with business ideas that they heard from this podcast. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Check out tkowners.com we'd love to have you. All right, here's the second of three. This woman is doing a good thing for her community. Everything's giving. She gives out free coffee and muffins to her neighborhood and people show up in great number and partake. If you were a business owner, let's say a roofer, H vac something high ticket, you should absolutely do this and unabashedly sell your services to your neighbors in exchange for a 50 cent muffin. Because people buy from people, people they like, know and trust. And the law of reciprocity is very real, which states that if you give someone something for free, they feel like they owe you back, even if the value of those two things is completely different. Here's the next one woman right here. She lives a half hour from me, Frisco, Texas, and she's making hundreds of dollars a day in profit selling bakery items from her front yard with no employees. It's an on your honor system and it works. And if you don't think it would work, then shame on you because people are good. Also, the typical labor cost for a food business is about 30%. So even if 30% of their products are stolen, which nowhere even close to that, they're still coming out ahead. Best thing is, she Just lives in an average residential neighborhood. Look at the line that formed at 7:30 in the morning while she's inside sleeping, because she did have to stay up all night baking. Okay, so the first and third videos were pretty similar, but with the first one she had like kind of like a greenhouse, like a little shed that certainly cost a good chunk of change. And in the other one it was just a woman living in her house in a residential neighborhood that just sets up all the bakery items on like a, like a six foot plastic folding table, literally on her front porch. Would this work in every neighborhood? No. Would this work in most neighborhoods? Absolutely. So I just love the idea of doing this, of having a farm stand, bakery or eggs that you don't need an employee to be there for. And I also love the idea of bringing free food to all of your neighbors with a business card. So you can start to get the law of reciprocity involved with whatever it is you're selling. And it doesn't have to have anything to do with food or bakery items or anything. It could be a service business or product or whatever. It's just a good way to do good while also hoping for a profit in the future. And last, but certainly not least, in fact, this is last and best, my first favorite food idea of 2026, which also has three different sub concepts to it all. Watermelon related. This first video was me at a Fourth of July celebration in Rexburg, Idaho, 2025. And I'm just sitting there with my family and this kid comes up with a cooler selling wapsicles, AKA a watermelon on a stick, like a watermelon popsicle. And I just had to talk to this guy. So I did. I bought a bunch of stuff from him and this was the result of everything I learned. The guy right here, I'm at a parade and this kid's selling watermelon on a stick. I want to ask him how much money he's making. What's your story?
I do landscaping stuff. I got surgery on my shoulder, so I just stopped and I thought, what would be a great way to make some money during the summer? And I thought, you know what, selling cheap stuff during that parade, that'd be a great way to make some money.
And you've never done it before?
Never. This is the first time I've ever done this before. So I got some for my dad. We bought seven watermelons and two bags of ice.
You spent all day cutting up watermelons yesterday?
Yep, all day.
Did you think of the Name Wobsicle, or is that a thing?
I thought of this, actually.
And what's your margin on one obstacle? 20 cents cost, I'm guessing.
Yeah, 20. 15 cents.
Okay. Nice. How many have you sold so far today?
I'd guess around 50.
Cool. That's it. 20 cents cost. Sell it for a buck. Parades, farmer's market. Anywhere there's people. All right, here's the next. Do you have any idea how popular this product is Right now? In Iraq, they're selling tons of them. But when I saw this video, I ran to grab my camera and make this video. This is a ready to eat sandwich made with watermelon as the bread and cheese as the filling. Depending on which country you're in, you can sell them for two to eight dollars a piece. And from that, about 75 cents of every dollar is pure profit to each. You remember the kid I met in this video that was selling watermelon on a stick in Idaho? Yes. Think that find five high foot traffic areas and test all five of them on the same day of the week at the same time of day across five different weeks. Now you know where to sell that thing to make the most money. Okay, so another watermelon product, and the third one I was going to talk about, I cannot find a video for. It's basically you take a mini watermelon and you cut the top off and you get like a hand mixer and you blend up all the watermelon inside to make like a watermelon slushy. And you put a big straw in there and you sell it for like nine bucks. Right. The watermelons cost like two to three bucks because they're really small. That would be the third watermelon product. So this is more of a seasonal thing. Depends on where you live, but very high margin. It's an easy way to get started in business. It's very approachable. You're going to learn a lot about yourself, you're going to learn a lot about sales, and it's going to be a great foray into your next business, which will probably be even more successful.
