Question

closing case Exporting Desserts products of different sizes and flavors, and transformed the food industry The opening line of the "About" section of Lulu's Dessert's website-www. by creating the first ready-to-eat gelatin category based largely on her mother's recipes. The business concept has become quite a "spoon spectacular" since Lulu first began, with a catch line for the company of "more fun for your spoon lulusdessert.com-is "pull up a chair and join in the festival of flavors with Lulu's Gelatin Desserts, Taking basic ingredients and creatinga myriad of flavors has led to worldwide exporting success for Lulu's Dessert Corpora- tion. Started in 1982 in a 700-square-foot storefront in Torrance, California, followed by exporting to Mexico in 1992, the company is a gelatin dessert business with core customer target markets in the United States and The party started out very small with just Lulu making her mother's gelatin recipe desserts, with an initial production of 300 cups of gelatin per day. Ultimately, the party grew so big that Lulu could not handie it by her- self and had to negotiate help from established markets and wholesale distributors. Lulu wanted everyone within reach to enjoy her festival of flavors. In going international, Lulu spent some 10 years trying to gain in- ternational sales but continued to run into all kinds of problems and issues. Mexico but with exporting to several countries worldwide, Lulu is the nick name of the founder, Maria de Lourdes Sobrino. "Lulu" thought of the idea of ready-to-eat flavored gelatin desserts when she was looking for the popular dessert in local stores. At the time, she was living in the United States, but originally she came from Mexico. The ready-to-eat flavored gelatin desserts were a staple in her native Mexico, but the concept was a novelty when she introduced it to American grocers. Today, Lulu's Desserts can be found in a variety of well-known stores (e.g., Albertsons, Safeway, Walmart) Back in the early 1980s, Lulu identified and recognized a need for After the trial-and-error decade, she found assistance from the U.S. Export- Import Bank services and now has deeper confidence in her abilities to export products worldwide. Over the years., Lulu has kept making more and more varieties of her gelatin desserts. A carnival of colors of three-layer gelatins, fruit parfaits, and festive containers of wild new colors and flavors have become identi- fying marks. This exporting innovation led Bill Hopkins of USA Today to call Maria de Lourdes Sobrino "the queen of ready-to-eat gelatins and a force gelatin desserts, filled it with what has now become 45 ready-to-eat Welcome to Lulu's Dessert." www.lulusdessert.com 401 Chapter Fourteen Exporting, Importing, and Countertrade

Answer 1

1. Two of the favorable destination of Lulu’s dessert products would be favored are India and China. India is one of the attractive destination of expansion of business as well as China with huge number of population. If the taste of lulu’s product is well received there is a tremendous scope of revenue generation from these countries.
2. EX-IM is a federal agency whose mission is to support American companies with loans and insurances to expand in overseas countries. It protects the companies from political and commercial hindrances created by foreign countries. It acts as an agent for American countries for level the playing field of American companies operating overseas. So undoubtedly EX-IM is playing a major role in assisting American companies.
3. Franchising may not be a good option for Lulu’s expansion as the quality and standard may get compromised in its growth phase of business cycle and which can leave a negative impression in its early phase of expansion.
4. In today’s world business analytics is one of the major tool to stay in competition some of the analytics that can be used for Lulu’s products are:

• Demographic Information: Before expansion an in depth analysis of the demographic of the country is necessary. The culture and tradition of the country, peoples acceptance in new things and taste of people as well.
• Identification of weakness and strength: The measurement of strength and weakness is a major analytics. It gives a holistic scenario for market segmentation and positioning and adaptability with new rivalries.
• Micro-Market Strategies: It helps organization to analyse large data sets and find the meaningful insights for the company to expand in micro level.
• Future Growth Opportunities: By using business analytics future growth opportunities are identified which are not commonly found in traditional analytics.