Kudler Fine Foods Kudler Fine Foods is a specialty food store with three locations currently. The owner and founder is Kathy Kudler and established in 1998. Kathy strides to give her customers the best specialty food with exceptional service. Kathy visits each of her stores regularly and does a lot of the back office work so her management team and sales associates can interact with the customers on a regular basis and keep up an exceptional rapport with repeat and new customers. While Kathy is happy to do all the back office work, she would still like to interact with her clients to keep her presence known and is able to hear what customers are saying and any feedback that is given. While Kudler Fine Foods is the only known specialty food store around there is no known competitor in their geographical region. Ways that Kathy can keep competition up is to build her catering side of the business and keep prices reasonable for her products. Having a catering service offered by her industry will help boost sales as long as it is marketed in the right places and properly. Another way to stay on the up and up of competition is to offer gluten free products. Even though Kathy is not basing her products on the healthy side but on the high end quality side, by having a gluten free menu and products for her customers will help sales increase due to the demand for gluten free foods now (Kudler Fine Foods, 2013). While looking at the marking surveys from 2012 and 2013 there are a lot of similarities and not may differences. One that stood out to me personally was the pricing question with the economy the way it is there is definitely reason behind the answers given. The question asked was “the merchandise sold is a good value for the money.” Most participants either said agree or disagree. Picking this question out of all that were asked is because if there is a competitor that arises in the future prices will be a major reason for customers to choose from. Another aspect that is taken out of this question is that the food is not priced correctly. This meaning that the food is not as spectacular to the customers as was thought to be. Altogether, however, customers are very pleased with Kudler Fine Foods and that is how it needs to be kept. By improving pricing and maybe even appeal to customers will help if competitors arise (Kudler Fine Foods, 2013). In order for Kathy Kudler to become more competitive if a market opens up for a more competitive market she should do a few things to her business to stay high up on everyone’s list for fine foods. One thing that should occur is that the catering business should be expanding and being marketed properly. Right now the catering portion of Kathy’s business is not expanding and being used much because it is not marketed properly. Kathy should be marketing Kudler Fine Foods Catering in party environments. Examples of such are weddings, graduation parties, communions, confirmations, and so much more. In order to get an income surplus of these catering events the catering service must be marketing properly. Kathy should be marketing her services in local newspapers and magazines that are specializing in parties and catering. In order to market properly, Kathy must also produce samples for such events. A little more spending may occur at first, however, that little deficit will end up becoming a surplus in the long run. One other way to help make her market more competitive is that Kathy can over rewards for shopping (Kudler Fine Foods, 2013). The market structure that best describes Kathy’s company Kudler Fine Foods would be a monopoly. The reasoning for this is because there is no competition in the geographical area and there does not seem to be a threat of a competition being created. No other food store has opened that is for fine foods for fine dining, which is Kathy’s goal and mission with her chain of stores. Yes, Whole Foods is based for healthy foods, however, Kudler is