Here’s a rejection letter we received from PEET’s coffee, a large chain of coffee shops out West. We pitched the idea of selling Aunt Erma’s in a small three piece box, Coffee Bean (based in Los Angeles) got the same three piece prototype.
Waiting for the jewish holidays. We have one store waiting for a re-order and a local customer needing one case of mandel bread, but volume is volume, so we’ve asked customers waiting for Aunt Erma’s to hold off for about 3 more weeks when we do a large run of Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread for the jewish holidays.
The one exception, our favorite customer, a 97 year old in Wisconsin woman who has been quoted as saying “I’m dying for some more of that wonderful mandel bread you sent me.” Will get her mandel bread right away!
Meanwhile. here’s a little ad press for our friends at Behave! hair. Really an awesome product. Check it out!
Thanks everybody who jumped in and answered the questions on Survey Monkey.
Every so often I go thru and delete the pile of spam in the comments section and find someone who wrote in. Just a reminder that I have turned comments off due to bot spam.
If you’d like to contact me directly it’s phil@auntermas.com
Thanks!
If you’ve ever thought about doing market research for your new product, but didn’t want to spend any money, then here’s a great resource. SurveyMonkey.
Survey Monkey allows you to create survey’s that you can email out. It’s super easy to use and the basic account is free. So let’s say you’re trying to figure out if
people would be interested in your Gluten Free Protein Bars, or you’re wondering what exactly compels a consumer to buy one sphaghetti sauce over the
other? The label? The price? With survey monkey you craft your survey any way you like and they analyze the results. Pretty Cool
Here’s a SurveyMonkey survey I created for a piece of software I’ve been developing.
Click the link below, and by all means answer the survey (Only 5 questions, check it out)
I was surprised to get a re-order from Whole Foods Pasadena, the one store that was nice enough to carry Aunt Erma’s mandel bread, but definitely outside a region with a large jewish community. Meanwhile we’re about a month away from a big push for the Jewish New Year, and some top secret stuff happening on the side, still not ready to mention yet, but fingers are crossed.
Now about Aunt Erma and her phone bill. The real Aunt Erma is doing well in Maryland, still living in the same house my grandmother lived in (the house pictured on the mandel bread packaging.) Aunt Erma will be 90 in September. She’s getting to an age where she needs help paying her bills. It’s not a financial problem, Aunt Erma has always been quite frugal. The problem is actually remembering to pay the bills when they come in. So my parents started picking up Aunt Erma’s mail to pay her bills. They made an interesting discovery when they took a look at Aunt Erma’s phone bill. Aunt Erma has been paying a rental charge on her telephone. This is a crappy old rotary dial phone that you could buy at Target for 10 bucks. Turns out Aunt Erma has been charged on average $15.00 a quarter to rent her phone, and brace yourself – for 47 years! This is pretty damn outrageous. I did some surfing and discovered that this scam, this shake down of the elderly is a problem for over a million senior citizens who simply don’t know that this charge on their phone bill is completely unneccesary. My parents think Aunt Erma has paid almost $3000.00 in rental fees over the years. She is not alone. There is a company out there, QLT making millions off this. This company should be ashamed of themselves. I’ve put a few links below to various news stories, including a class action law suit from 2002. I’ve also created this online form for people to fill out if they have a loved ones who are getting hit with this crap scam. Please check the phone bills of your loved ones. Any thoughts on what we can do to stop this scam?
My friend Erick came up with great twist on the Groupon idea. TownLoop. TownLoop is just like Groupon, LivingSocial, Dealfinds etc. but with a fantastic approach to giving back to the community.
Pretty simple how it works. Sign up with your email and pick the school of your choice. Elementary schools, private, public, doesn’t matter. Everytime you buy a deal on TownLoop (and they’re just like Groupon, usually half price deals) they will take 20% and donate that money back to your school.
I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired of buying crappy wrapping paper and cookie dough, and feeling obligated to buy overpriced books at the ‘Book Fair” just to raise a few dollars for the school. TownLoop is awesome. You get a great deal on something you might actually want, and your school benefits everytime.
They’re just out here in SoCal, but expanding quickly. Check it out!
Here we are on the shelves at Whole Foods Market Sherman Oaks. Good shelf position. We lowered our online price to try and help offset the ridiculous shipping prices. Aunt Erma’s retails for $7.99 a box at Whole Foods Markets, but for our online customers the price is now just $5.99.
Happy July Fourth!
Though adding new stores has been slow, the five Whole Foods Markets we are in are doing well. While we were away on vacation, Whole Foods Markets Fairfax ordered another two cases. Normally, this would cause a small manufacturing panic, but now with a co-pack manufacturer and stock on hand, it was a simple drive at 5:30 this morning to deliver the goods. Which reminds me of another cheap and free tool we use for managing the business. Google Docs. No need to provide a link, simply google “Google Docs” and sign in for access to a great free suite of tools for spreadsheets, letters, even presentations. It’s all managed and saved securely online, all you need is web access and all of your documents are instantly available from anywhere in the world. We track our sales calls, deliveries and manufacturing costs using google docs. The last delivery to Whole Foods Fairfax was exactly four weeks ago, (according to my google spreadsheet doc), so we’re currently selling two cases a month at that store. Beverly Hills ran thru two cases in about a week and a half. The other three stores were added later, time will tell if they sell at all, or enough to trigger a reorder.
I also wanted to send a shout out to another start-up in the San Francisco area. Talk about awesome recipes. Check out the videos at TheEasyIndian.com and stay tuned for their products! TheEasyIndian is bringing back the flavors of authentic Indian cooking with a mind towards the freshest organic spice mixtures currently unavailable in the market.
And a special thanks to Jonathan Packman, who, while employed at Whole Foods Markets in Northern California challenged Aunt Erma to a Mandel Bread bake-off against his grandmother’s mandel bread flown in from her home in Florida. Jonathan’s early guidance of the Whole Foods ecosystem helped us land our first Whole Foods store back in 2009. I finally got to meet Jonathan at his new employer Andronico’s Family Markets and say hello in person while up north. Thanks again Jonathan.
Starting tomorrow (June 12, 2011) Aunt Erma’s Old Fashioned mandel bread can be found at Whole Foods Markets Tarzana!
One of the coolest things about this blog is hearing from all the entrepreneurial people out there who are trying to get started in the food business. I’m only a couple of baby steps ahead, but happy to share what I’ve learned. This email came in yesterday, I thought it was worth posting:
Hey Phil!
My husband and I are on the verge of starting our own company, much like yourself. We both are young, but have the hearts of entrepreneurs and are eager to be self-employed. I have a question for you….we are still fine-tuning our product and would like to carry it in whole foods, but as I am doing research, it becomes discouraging because there is just so much competition and the supply seems to outweigh the demand in most situations. My question to you is, how do you set your product apart from the others, or create a demand for your product when it “appears” that the market is saturated? Does that deter you To want to be in a market less saturated, or do you think there is still a good profit to be made in a market that is rich in supply?
Thanks for your advice! Your blog has encouraged my husband and I to dream big and be determined!!! Thank you for writing it!!
My reply:
Congrats on starting your own business! I wouldn’t worry about the competition too much. If you
Last week was a slow one getting product out there. I visited 12 Whole Foods Markets and got 10 of the 12 leaders to agree to carry Aunt Erma’s. The other two stores, the leaders weren’t in when I stopped by. I thought we were over the hurdle. After all, we finally got label approval and met Whole Foods strict ingredients requirements, overcame the early confusion of a product with the name “Erma” and Whole Foods computerized ordering system “IRMA,” and managed to get on the shelves with our first store practically selling out the first day. But now, with inventory on hand, getting those leaders I visited to sit down on the computer and actually place an order has been a real challenge. I’m not sure what the trick is. Lots of follow up calls, and the weird thing is, the leaders are all still on board. When I get them on the phone, none have said “No dude, I changed my mind, we’re not going to carry your product.” On the contrary, it’s usually “Oh yeah, no problem, I’ll put the PO in today.” But then I wait and wait and the order doesn’t come in. So I’m trying new tricks like asking for the leaders email address to follow up. I’m driving back to some of the stores with more product samples, but this time I put a sticker on the box that has Whole Foods IRMA product number on it, make it easier to find in the computer. And something new has developed along the way, too soon to talk about, but another direction for Aunt Erma’s. Stay tuned.
So I thought last week would be an inventory bust, but last Friday good ole’ Whole Foods Beverly Hills had burned through it’s first order of 2 cases of mandel bread in about 1.5 weeks and ordered 2 more. Here’s a picture of it on the shelves.
Starting tomorrow (May 29th) Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread will be available at Whole Foods Market Sherman Oaks!
Starting today, Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread is being carried at Whole Foods Pasadena. Stay tuned, we’re adding stores fast!
Welcome Aunt Erma’s Old Fashioned Mandel Bread back to the shelves of Whole Foods Market Beverly Hills and Whole Foods Market Fairfax!!
I meet the most interesting people from this blog. Gary Hartshorn and his son Shawn are the founders of Behave! hair. Gary’s story is a great inspiration about the entrepreneurial spirit of Americans. Gary is in the lighting business, doing large commercial and residential projects. Selling an honest product in a slow economy is bad for business. Namely, his products never need replacement.
So, looking for other things to do, he looked around. Turns out Gary has a chemistry backround. He looked at hair products, with all their chemicals, alcohol, and greasy residues and thought. “I can make something better.” And so Behave! hair spray was born. All natural, without alcohol or chemical propellants, Behave! hair spray naturally binds to damaged blown dry hair to strengthen hair follicles. He is building a fan base one at a time.
Like alot of the people I’ve spoken too, Gary and Shawn were wondering how to get their product in to Whole Foods Market. We met for coffee and chatted about all things Whole Foods.
I love the idea that anyone, at any age, anywhere in America, can do anything. How cool that a guy with an entire career in the lighting business can take a shot a being the all natural hair spray king.
Good luck to Gary and Shawn. I’ll be following your progress! and check out their website.
btw – if you’d like to contact me. phil@auntermas.com – Too much spam to keep comments open. Thanks!
I’ve always wanted to be very open about our little mandel bread business, and maybe that’s why I hesitated a discussion about margins last month because I would be revealing our wholesale price. But here goes anyway.
Whole Foods likes to maintain an average margin of around 42%. My understanding is that some product areas are much higher, like bakery which can be above 50%, or produce in the 30% range. I may not be totally correct on the upper and lower range but that 42% average was confirmed by a Whole Foods team member. So now you know when you walk in to a Whole Foods Market, everything in that store is marked up on average 42%. That’s a big mark-up. I’m not complaining, obviously the company spends a ton on design and construction to build those beautiful markets. They’ve got to make that money somewhere to pay for it all.
As we started to go into re-introduction with mass production of Aunt Erma’s, I emailed the buyer and asked for a favor. ” Would you consider lowering the retail price?” At $7.99 a box, I felt the price was a bit high, I’ve never wanted to price us out of the market. Knowing their margin is 42% I argued that my wholesale price ($4.62/box) gave plenty of room for Whole Foods to drop the price, maybe $6.99? and still be in the margin. Here’s the math I presented. $4.62 x .73 (73%) = $3.37. $3.37 + $4.62 = $7.99, Whole Foods retail price. I thought I was presenting what appeared to be a 73% margin. Sounded about right. They’re getting it for four and some change, and almost doubling the price for a retail of almost eight bucks. Not so said the buyer. She cannot lower my retail price because we are already at that magic 42% margin. How can that be?
That’s when I discovered that there are two ways to calculate margins. This link explains. For a 42% margin I needed to divide my cost by .58 (42%). So 4.62/.58 = $7.97.
When you go talk to store leaders figure out that margin. If you are inline with their 42% range or better, they’ll know that you know how to price your product to sell at Whole Foods. By the way, this is the one big killer for mom and pops trying to break in to WFM. What you might think is a fair wholesale cost, can give the customer sticker shock, “Hey if I sell my cookies to WFM for five bucks they’ll sell like crazy at $6.00… what? 42% margin means my retail is $8.62?! Who is gonna pay almost nine bucks for some cookies! ?
As for Aunt Erma’s, only way to get our retail price down is to lower our wholesale cost. But we’re already squeezed for profit with little room to lower the price. But hey, someday.
And for the over four hundred regular readers of this blog, if you send me an email and mention you read this post “Living on the margin.” you can order Aunt Erma’s mandel bread and I’ll let you have it for our wholesale price of $4.62 a box. You still gotta pay shipping, I don’t charge any handling, just what USPS charges me, I pass along to you.
Maybe I’ll keep this offer good through the summer? We’ll see how things go…
This stuff looks good! Another mandel bread company. LibbyandLaura is out of the Chicago area. I found them online in the comment section of this Article.
Nice product packaging and props for keeping their prices reasonable.
Last Monday our baker completed another test batch of Aunt Erma’s. The results? The closest anyone outside the family has ever come to matching Aunt Erma’s original recipe. A few minor tweaks and the product is ready to go. Meanwhile, I’ve been taking Aunt Erma’s around to as many Whole Foods Markets as I can to ask them about carrying our product. So far 12 Whole Foods Markets have agreed to try us out. The first official order came in last week thru the Whole Foods Markets DVO system. The selling process is a bit easier than before. All of those little things, getting in “the system,” knowing how to answer the right questions, “Are you local?” Yes. ”Are you UNFI?” No. Direct. “Does your product scan?” Yes. “What’s your minimum order?” 1 case. “Kosher?” Yes. Kosher Dairy. “Is this bakery?” No grocery. Goes in the cookie section except when there’s a special jewish holiday, when it’s end isle with the Kosher stuff. “Demo?” Yeah, we’d like to do that, who is your marketing person at this store? Mentioning we are working with a Whole Foods Market Local Forager helps too. And so now it comes down to pestering the Stor Leaders to place the order in the system, deliver the product, and cross our fingers. Let’s hope it sells as well as it has always sold in our one Whole Foods Store, Beverly Hills.
On another note. So we’re not sure exactly what it is, but Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread seems to be very popular with our hispanic customers. I’m not sure what the deal is, but we always get a big response from anyone hispanic who tries Aunt Erma’s (My wife thinks it’s because of the cinnamon on the mandel bread.) Anyway, this brings me to a funny little side story. So I mentioned our baker made the test batch this week. The baker said that if I was satisfied with the results of the test he would be happy to box up the extra mandel bread for me. I appreciated the offer, after all he is doing the test on his own time, and any boxed mandel bread he gives me he has essentially baked for free. So a day after the test I brought some empty boxes to the baker and said, “If you want to box up that extra mandel bread that’d be great.” He paused a moment and said, “Well, we’ve sort of been eating it all.” In a factory, full of baked goodies the bakers are eating Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. Funny that most of the bakers and workers in the factory are hispanic. Which has me thinking that maybe this product would do well in Hispanic grocery stores?
A few of the latest updates from the Mandel Bread world. Last night ABC’s Shark Tank premiered, There was an update on the status of Jeff Cohen’s Granola Gourmet. I’ve posted about Granola Gourmet in previous posts. You can see them all here. You can watch the entire Shark Tank epsiode by clicking on the Shark Tank link. Jeff was very helpful early on in our business.
We haven’t done any baking for Whole Foods Markets since last fall, waiting to transition over to our co-pack baker. The process has been very slow, from re-approvals on labeling to custom parts, it is the main part of our business and it’s been been stalled for months. But Aunt Erma’s, Inc. has stayed very lean, ordering packaging from overseas, using the free Google voice for our company phone number, getafreelancer to build the web site, the free open source shopping cart Zen Cart for orders online, and now the fantastic and free SquareUp! to process credit card orders. What I’m saying is that all these little things have allowed us to survive just filling internet orders over these past months while we were trying to get squared away with the co-packer and Whole Foods Markets. If we were a big company with unlimited resources, we could’ve thrown thousands of dollars at all these things and hope it would speed up the process of expanding. But one thing staying lean gives us is the luxury of time. Our biggest annual expense is the completely ridiculous business tax the state of California hits all businesses operating in California. I call it the “punishment for having a business in California tax.” There’s an $800.00 minimum annual tax on your business here in Ca. So if you have a year where you lose money , the big thank you from the State of California is a bill due April 15th, for another $800.00. One of Meg Whitman’s big issues when she ran for governor was to abolish this tax. I wish she had won.
But on to better news. Last Friday I picked up our industrial sized custom made mandel bread cutter from the stainless steel manufacturer. I had them re-work the part several times, which meant dealing with getting bumped every time the manufacturer had a “bigger job” come in. The delays began in late January, but with no major mandel bread events hitting, I was definitely leaning on that luxury of time factor. In any case, we now have new labels, and a big specialty part. Monday am it’s back to the baker for one final test using the new part. With the help of our Whole Foods Local Forager we should be back in Whole Foods Markets very soon, and I can focus on expanding to more stores without the trouble we had a year ago, trying to do everything: sell, bake and deliver. Should be just sell and deliver now. For the record, Aunt Erma’s original recipe will be baked with the exact same ingredients as always, and we will officially get a “Kosher Dairy” status from our co-packers Kosher certifier.
Whole Foods Market has given the ok to use a specialty label adhesive sticker over our existing packaging. Pretty awesome turn of events, considering what happened last summer.
We did a home test this weekend using the co-pack bakers ingredients (his brand of chips and flour). We’re trying to do Aunt Erma proud, the most important step to make sure that our mass produced mandel bread tastes exactly like the kind that comes out of Aunt Erma’s oven.
One more specialty part to manufacture for the co-pack baker, and everything will be in place to go back to Whole Foods without any production limitations. On my next post we should have a short list of the stores we will back in, hopefully by the end of January.
Another anouncement (a good one!) is coming from Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. Happy New Year.
1945 photo taken in front of the family grocery store. The same store featured in The Story of Aunt Erma’s mandel Bread
That’s my father Milton doing the Rockette on the right. Happy Holidays!
Phil
What you’re looking at is an approved label from Whole Foods Market for Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. Got the ok yesterday from the ‘Local Forager.’ The next hurdle is packaging. Over a year ago I jumped off a cliff and ordered 10,000 boxes for Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. At the time I knew very little about product labeling, weights etc. The biggest mistake was printing a nutritional label with a Whole Foods unapproved ingredient. This has become something of an albatross. Whole Foods would like the approved label printed on the box.
I priced boxes locally and was not surprised to find that local printers can’t compete, I mean, not even close to overseas pricing. 1000 boxes printed locally using the exact same box specs costs over $4.00/box. Yikes! 5000 boxes lowers the price to over a dollar a box. I have to get all the way up to 25,000 boxes to get the local price in spitting distance of what I paid overseas. And the local guys are still 38¢ cents per box. Compare that to 22¢ per box for a lower quantity (10,000 boxes) from China – and that cost included shipping! Customs clearings and delivery to Burbank brought the average up to 27¢ per box. Still 11¢ cheaper per box than the local guys. And 11¢ savings adds up to a lot of pennies when you’re talking box counts in the thousands.
So the final hurdle is figuring out how to redo those boxes to satisfy Whole Foods, and with that in place we should be ready to re-introduce Aunt Erma’s on a bigger scale.
A journalist refreshed a story about Aunt Erma’s in her new column “Eat History”
Check it out here!
We’ve been taking our time with our new co-packer, waiting for a couple of tests and some special equipment adjustments before relaunch. The day job has become gradually busier and without my co-pack firmly ready to produce there is no reason to troll the grocery stores of Los Angeles looking for other retailers. Aunt Erma’s has been off the shelves of Whole Foods Markets for several months now, much to the shagrin of one avid fan who emailed me about his many unsuccessful trips to Whole Foods to treat his Aunt Erma’s mandel bread addiction.
The Costco Roadshow is a no go for us, frankly I don’t understand why any company would want to do the roadshow, they don’t seem like money makers to me. Either you have to price the product so high that no one will buy it, or drop the price so low that it’s a break even proposition. Not to mention giving away massive amounts of free samples which chip away at the bottom line. I like Costco, but the roadshow just seems like a way for them to feed their customers for free on the weekends.
Last week we met with the head of a brand spanking new department at Whole Foods. ”Local Forager” This job was created to find the latest new products and help them in to Whole Foods. According to the Local Forager I met with, going store to store pitching your product is no longer allowed. I was told this practice ended in the summer. But those of you who follow this blog know that I did continue to go store to store this September and successfully got about a half a dozen Whole Foods Team Leaders to agree to carry Aunt Erma’s. But since we never delivered, the assistance of a Local Forager to re-introduce our product seems like a good idea. Bad news is that the Local Forager has already mentioned the sticker on the box being a problem. Seems like I’m going to have to suck it up and order fresh packaging. Ugh.
Thanks to the fantastic SquareUp! service we are once again accepting credit card payments without the need to go through PayPal on at www.auntermas.com
Just make your purchase, enter your credit card, and you’re done!
Ever wander in to a Costco and see those people handing out samples? I’m not talking about the plastic stretchy cap ole’ ladies down the isles. But the enthusiastic, logo emblazoned people trying to get you to come over and try their stuff? This is what Costco calls ‘The Roadshow.” Costco gives companies the opportunity to sell their products in Costco. Costco loves the idea of their stores being kindof like a ‘treasure hunt.’ So this concept, rotating various different roadshow products, spices up the otherwise dull 95% of stuff that never changes in the Costco isle. So last week I met Costco’s in-house broker to discuss doing a roadshow for Aunt Erma’s. For a food entrepreneur it at first seems like a great opportunity. Average sales volume are huge. The broker walked me through the process. There’s a small book of documents to go through in order to participate in the roadshow at Costco. Here’s the basics. Costco will give you space in the store for $35.00 per day. The recommended roadshow days are Friday-Sunday. All good so far. Costco takes 14% of your gross sales, the in-house broker another 3%. Still not too bad. Costco keeps track of sales at the register and will pay you right away. In most cases the very next day! Even better. Be prepared to give away big sized samples, my broker estimated I would be giving away about 3.5 cases of samples a day. My out of pocket costs over three days, almost $300.00 per store. Hmm, not so good. The sample giver outer people are also my cost, so are banners, t-shirts, caps, the table and anything else you want to set-up to jazz up the space. You are required to have 2 people at all times during operating hours, which means 10-11 hour days. Not likely my wife and I can stand there for 33 hours so even 10/hr. hires will cost in the high $600.00 range for three days per store. The Costco buyer is also looking for a value. Aunt Erma’s mandel bread sells for $7.99 a box at Whole Foods Markets My thought was to bundle two of those boxes together and sell them for $7.99. I won’t bore you with all the details, but when I put all the numbers down on a spreadsheet, based on the broker’s estimated sales per day, and my estimated costs, I would lose almost $270.00 over three days for every store I was road showing!
I know what you’re thinking. Just raise the retail price. Problem is, if I raise the retail price to $8.99, true enough, over three days we take home a profit of $250.00 per store. But two things are at play here. First, that’s a very slim profit, any sales slumps, or mis fires on anything else and we’re losing money again. #2 I think Costco shoppers are really looking for a great value. $8.99 may have a value perception of being too high. The imaginary barrier to buy. Whole Foods buyers are ready to accept higher priced items. But Costco? For me to safely clear a profit I would have to raise the two-pack bundle to $9.99 for two. And honestly, if I was shopping in Costco, and saw ten bucks for ‘some cookie’ – I think I’d pass.
I quick shout out to my friends at BlendersBBQ Check them out at Whole Foods Market’s in SoCal! I’ve met so many great food entrepreneurs on this journey, people willing to share their time and advice. Best way to thank them is to go out and buy their stuff!
And one more thing…We are still working through our high holiday snafu but expect to be back on the shelves in Beverly Hills and beyond in the next two-weeks!
What is the problem with Quickbooks support? Last night my Quickbooks locked up while trying to download AMEX transactions. Was stuck in an endless loop of these two pop-ups and no escape.
I tried deleting, logging off XP Pro (I’m running VM Ware on my Mac). Nothing worked…. So I called Quickbooks support. First thing they did was try to upsell me on Quickbooks 2011. I said No thanks, I own QB 2010 and Im just trying to resolve this problem at the moment. They then chastised me for not having a support contract. I think they wanted 25 or 30 dollars a month on a one year service contract or 35 bucks for the one time support call. I call bullshit on Intuit. They sell me a buggy piece of crap softtware and now I have to pay Intuit to support it?
I’ve owned Apple products and software for years, and whenever I had a problem I could call support and always get friendly support and advice. One time Apple even replaced a case on my Macbook that was two years out of warranty. They didn’t have to, but guess what? Because of their excellent service I buy Apple OS upgrades, own an iPad, an iMac and a MacBook, because not only are their products superior, but they back it up with their service. Never once was I hit with an upsell for another product from Apple. Quickbooks just lost a customer for life.
By the way, I browsed a forum and found a way to force quit QB which solved the PC lock-up problem. So for those who are as pissed off at Intuit as I am. Here’s an Open Source Accounting software that works on Mac, PC and Linux. Guess what? It’s free. I’m going to try it out tonight.
As I reported in my last post, the Jewish Holidays were a bust. Following my September 18th post a couple things have happened. First, after months on deck at a larger cookie co-pack, they finally got around to doing a test for Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. The result were good. For a first swing at it, they came very close to matching the flavor of our mandel bread. The down side is that their minimum orders are 1000lbs. So, I’ll need much larger orders to do business with these guys. But, like the smaller baker, they too are kosher, and could pump out 100 plus cases of Aunt Ermas in less than a day. Pretty easy, but I don’t think our packaging will work for their equipment. So that becomes a financial hurdle. Their price per pound could be much less than anyone else, so as the owner correctly pointed out, the cost savings on volume might make a loss on the original packaging worth the jump.
On the web site front. I’m always looking for ways to keep my costs super lean as we try to figure out how to make a footprint in the food biz. I mentioned in earlier posts that our shopping cart site is the totally free Zen-Cart. My web host Blue Host is less than 7 bucks a month, for multiple domains, which means I get www.auntermas.com, www.philweinstein.com, and anything else I register for the same low price. Pretty cool. Accepting credit cards on AuntErmas.com is another issue. There are multiple merchant account solutions thru the bank, but they all have monthly fees and require you to bank at a “bank.” I prefer to bank at my credit union. PayPal Web Payments Pro is $30.00/mo. plus transaction fees, but I have a wholesale business, and the web site is just so the occasional online person has a place to go if they want to order online, so an extra $30.00 a month is alot when we’re selling so few boxes of mandel bread monthly. Then there is the free PayPal which works great, but you’ve got to have a PayPal account, and the process of paying is a little daunting for some customers. Say hello to SquareUp. If you own an iPhone, and you’re sick of paying merchant account fees, then this is the sh-t! Sign-up for a free SquareUp account and the company sends this little Square thingie that plugs in to the headphone jack on your iPhone. Now you can accept credit cards on your iPhone using the little square plug to swipe the card. There are no set-up fees, no merchant account fees, no monthly crap-o-la nothing. I’ve got my square on the way. When it shows up, I can switch AuntErmas back to a direct credit card transaction site.
A week ago I teased a major announcement from Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. I’ve always wanted the development of this business to be as transparent as possible, so here goes.
Over the last two weeks we’ve been working with a co-pack manufacturer to take over the baking of Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. No surprise, I’ve been blogging our progress and the many attempts to find places to bake Aunt Erma’s over the past year.
Our business has not expanded because I simply couldn’t manage a day job and any more than the couple of stores and online web orders. Business was slow, but steady. After a year of searching we found just the right fit. The manufacturer isn’t far from my home, his facility is kosher, and by coincidence, he uses the same brand of mini-chips in our recipe which is amazing because I had found it very challenging just to find a distributor to order Wilbur Chips from Lititz, PA. out here in California.
I’ve known for some time that taking the next step was going to be a challenge. Going from completely hand made, to even a little bit of machine assistance was tough, but our co-pack guy was really great, doing several tests for us. The picture you see here is a box of Mandel Bread manufactured and packed at his place. Pretty cool!
Faced with the Jewish New Year right around the corner, I was pressuring him to commit to baking 25-50 cases of mandel bread by Friday, September 3rd. With only one week and a half until the Jewish New Year, I had my work cut out for me. I had pre-maturely tried a regional request, and was left with no choice but to go store to store and try to sell to as many of the 30+ Whole Foods Markets in the Southern California as I could in four days….all while holding down a day job. Turned out to be an almost impossible task. LA is huge. There were mornings I’d drive an hour and 45 minutes thru traffic, just to find that the grocery leader wasn’t in, or wasn’t carrying jewish holiday product. 6 stores in the region were simply too far: San Diego, Santa Barbara, La Jolla, Tustin, Santa Rosa and Laguna Beach I could never drive there and be back in time for a days work. As the week wore on I had made it to about fifteen stores. Some were firm commits, others I had to give a sample to an assistant, then follow up with the grocery leader on another day. Friday rolled around and I discovered that my co-packer was still fiddling with the baking process. Monday could be the latest he could bake, we could deliver Tuesday – still about 1.5 days window to Erev Rosh Hashana on Wednesday night. I went in to the weekend stressing about how exactly I was going to manage delivering all that mandel bread, then it dawned on me that Monday was Labor day. I emailed the baker who confirmed that no one would be working Monday. Not being jewish, I don’t think the co-pack guy understood the importance of having product on the shelves before Wednesday. We started two days before Rosh Hashana a year ago at one store, and it sold like crazy. So here we are Tuesday evening, one day before the Jewish New Year and we’re not going to make it. Our co-pack guy thinks we’ll need a custom die made, and that alone blows the window for Yom Kippur – The High Holiday that occurs a week from Saturday. And so, while a year ago we were running on fumes trying to keep up with the demand for one store, we find ourselves this year without any product for any stores, even though many have ordered it. Ugh.
** for an exciting announcement from Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread ** Don’t go anywhere – our next blog update will be this coming Friday….
I don’t write too much about the technology side of the business, but operating on a shoestring budget requires self-
troubleshooting. The shopping cart system I use is called ‘Zen-Cart,” a free open source shopping cart that allows customers to order Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread online. One of the features of my web host is that whenever Zen Cart upgrades their software, all I have to do is click a button and my site www.auntermas.com gets upgraded to the latest version of Zen Cart. But that’s where my trouble began last week. I was following a typical one click upgrade for Zen Cart through my web host when things went haywire. After the upgrade was completed, all of the information on auntermas.com defaulted back to the original sample text. So if you clicked on “Contact” what you would see is a piece of text that said “Sample text…etc. I had to manually go in to every page of my site and recreate the text, even re-link the mandel bread image. But still I had troubles. When I would go to auntermas.com I would get this message in a big red banner at the top of the page:
Your database appears to need patching to a higher level
I googled how to fix this error and got some really complicated techie explanations. Took about three days to figure it all out.
For you do it yourself Zen Cart folks, here’s how I fixed it.
Go to zencart and download zen cart to your desktop
In the downloaded zen cart folder you’ll find a folder called zc_install
Log in to your web host ( I use bluehost) and upload the zc_install folder to your site
In your web browser type in www.your web site.com/zc_install
Follow the instructions to upgrade your database
All fixed!
Don’t forget to back to your web host and delete the zc_install folder from your site or you’ll get a warning message.
What you’re looking at is the first baking test of Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread from our co-pack manufacturing facility.
This is the first time anyone outside the family has had access to the recipe for Aunt Erma’s Mandel and baked a batch without our supervision. The results are encouraging. There are some size and flavor issues. In their test, the mandel bread pieces were larger and thicker, giving the finished product a ‘cakey’ sort of texture, and there is a distinct after taste. Not that it’s a bad taste, just different. Right now were trying to determine where the flavor deviation comes from. Oven temp too high? Different brand of vanilla? or maybe there was some other product in their oven at the time and there was some flavor migration. The good news is that for a first whack at it it was pretty close, with some minor adjustments we should be ready to take a swing at a big push for the jewish holidays.
I also wanted to mention my friend Souheil at Ms. Cotti in Cleveland Ohio. Souheil makes a really great alternative to regular biscottis, a softer and tastier version in a bunch of different flavors. I found Souheil back in 2008 when we were just starting to look for mandel bread manufacturers. Some day, we hope to go national, and Souheils manufacturing facility could be the perfect fit for out of state mandel bread production. Check out his products and and don’t forget to tell him you heard about Ms. Cotti from Aunt Erma.
I can’t believe it, but after all this time we’re finally getting a baking test this week from a co-pack baker who is willing to take on Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread!
The place can produce the volume we need to handle the big push for the jewish holidays, up to 100 cases. And they’re kosher! Up until now, Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread has only been able to claim “100% kosher ingredients” because the last two rental kitchens we’ve used were not kosher. If the new place works out, we’ll be faced with new challenges. First, we’ll need to get a sticker promoting the fact that we are kosher. Second problem, in order to run Aunt Erma’s mandel bread thru a sealer, we needed to add a tray internally to the box. No big deal except that we can’t fit 16 pieces in that box with the tray and the seal wrap. So 12 is a nice round number. Now we have to adjust the nutritional panel (another sticker) to reflect the total number of servings per package and total pieces in the box. For those of you noticing, the online pricing has been reduced, and the packaging now says “12 pieces.” But I feel so bad about the ridiculous cost of shipping everybody ordering a 12 piece box online actually gets a 16 piece box.
Our tried and true Whole Foods Store still continues to do good business. Whole Foods Beverly Hills, our first Whole Foods market has been consistently going through 1 to 2 cases a month of Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. They just ordered another case in less than a month. I’ll drive by tomorrow to see if they’re sold out, or just running low.
As we inch our way towards the Jewish New Year in the beginning of September, we have some evidence that Aunt Erma’s could be a year round product, in the right store. September will be an interesting month, if sales go through the roof in Beverly Hills like they did last September, we’ll have some real numbers to show.
We’re still faced with the ‘finding a baker’ dilemma, and we haven’t had a response from our sticker shocked Whole Foods regional buyer.
Meanwhile, thanks to Michel Algazi’s fantastic LA Fine Foods Group, we were able to get some samples in front of our regional Costco last Tuesday. As always, we are waiting for response.
But if you need some fresh baked mandel bread, truck on down to Crescent Avenue in Beverly Hills this weekend, they will be restocked with mandel bread in our new longer shelf life packaging. (Still all natural!)
Three generations of Mandel Bread eaters. My son Noah on the left, my father Milton in the middle and me
Awhile back I went to a tech meet up in Santa Monica and the guests were people from Google, who convinced our crowd that inserting google ads in to blog posts was a great way to increase revenue to your blog. I tried it for awhile but never liked the way they cheapened the way my blog looked, and the revenue wasn’t worth it. No more google ads! If you want to support this blog, spread the word about Aunt Erma’s – Phil
I had trouble sleeping a few weeks back. It was 3:30 am, and unable to fall back asleep I wandered downstairs and sat in front of the computer to surf. We’ve been in four Whole Foods Markets since late last September, and I haven’t wanted to expand to more stores until we could find a suitable co-pack partner for Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. Fantasy Cookie was and still is the best fit for our product, but with business booming for Fantasy, they never found the time to do a test bake run of Aunt Erma’s. When we toured their factory they even found a mould that looked to be about the right size to put Aunt Erma’s in their production chain. Fantasy also did a packaging test for us which worked great. We still have one of those sealed boxes, which almost 6 months later remains fresh in the box. But without a sizable order, and Fantasy’s already busy schedule we were caught between a rock and a hard place. I had stopped checking in on our stores, only those that used the DVO system were getting orders filled, otherwise I figured I’d wait until Fantasy was ready for us before requesting a regional push. But in the early hours I started to have other ideas. I sent an email to the regional buyer at Whole Foods Southern California. I asked for consideration for regional coverage. This would mean I no longer go store by store and instead deal with the regional buyer. I already knew what the regional buyers response would be before I sent the email. We simply didn’t have strong enough sales for regional consideration. And this is exactly what she said in her response at 7:45 am that morning. But, as I pointed out in my reply to the buyer, we started at one Whole Foods Market late last September, two days before the Jewish new year. The first day on the shelves we almost completely sold out. From Rosh Hashana (Jewish new year) and past Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) we sold about 8 cases of Aunt Erma’s mandel bread, averaging over 1.5 cases a week at that one store. Here is part of my reply to the Whole Foods buyer.
“So my thought was maybe we could try a special once a year thing when you guys have your Jewish holiday stuff out? We could take back any unsold stock after the Rosh Hashana Yom Kippur window peters out.”
The buyer responded by saying that she’d like to get some samples and pricing. I was excited that she was even going to consider the idea, and confident that our combination of being the only branded shelf ready mandel bread that contained Whole Foods acceptable ingredients, and a great tasting product, might do the trick. Even our wholesale pricing gives Whole Foods a greater margin than their average grocery item. I also offered to take back any unsold stock after the Jewish holidays were over.
Which brings me to the sticker.
Back when I first tried to get in to Whole Foods Markets I made the newbie mistake of not checking carefully the list of Whole Foods unacceptable ingredients. Turns out, Nestle Mini Morsels (in Aunt Erma’s original recipe) contain vanillin, an unacceptable ingredient. At that point I had already printed thousands of boxes with Nestle Mini Morsels ingredients in the nutritional panel. We switched to Wilbur chocolate drops, virtually identical in size to Nestle mini morsels but Wilbur chocolate contains vanilla, an approved Whole Foods ingredient. And the Wilbur chips taste great! So, I made a new nutritional label with the Wilbur chocolate drops ingredients correction and stickered over the old nutritional panel. We’ve been baking with Wilbur chips ever since. ( btw – I have three cases of leftover Nestle mini morsels in the closet at home, enough to make chocolate chip pancakes everyday for my kids for the next 50 years.)
Little did I know what kind of impression that little sticker would have. Noticing the sticker label, the regional buyer peeled off the sticker on her sample box of Aunt Erma’s to reveal the original nutritional label underneath. She became suspicious of our ingredients and said so in an email. I think the net effect is that she thought I was trying to put one over on her.
All I could do was explain why I put the sticker on the box in the first place. I’m waiting on a response from the buyer, but it was definitely a curve ball I wasn’t expecting. I think I need to stop sending emails at 3:00 in the morning.
I’ve talked about my friend Jeff Cohen from The Granola Gourmet in previous posts. (see Shark Tank) and also talked Michel Algazi’s very cool food networking group the LA Fine Foods Group. Thru The LA Fine Foods I found my food product liability and met many great food entrepreneurs like Jeff. Anyone in the LA area looking for a fantastic food networking group should join. It’s free. Jeff was on ABC’s short lived show, “The Shark Tank”, he presented his product “The Granola Gourmet.” I’ve read alot about raising Venture Capital, and the way they went about interviewing the entrepreneurs on the Shark Tank was more about television ratings than real “in the room” pitching.
Jeff’s home kitchen experiment to make a tasty low glycemic energy bar took a big leap this week as The Granola Gourmet rolls in to Vons/Pavillions and Safeway stores across the state of California! Jeff even has a special roll out offer. Check it out his cool offer here!
Congratulations Jeff!
What you’re looking at is an Impulse Sealer. These machines come in various sizes and are used to heat seal packages. Fantasy Cookie did a version of this for us in a test for Aunt Erma’s. We have a test package from Fantasy Cookie that was sealed over six months ago and the cookies are stable. No mold, no moisture. Sealing is critical for shelf life. Up until now, our product has been packed on food grade tissue paper. After 6 weeks or so we have to replace stale stock. We’re picking up an Impulse sealer this week so when we deliver to Whole Foods and other places, product will be ok on the shelves for months.
We’ve been working to find a co-pack manufacturer to help us our little mandel bread business grow. The challenge has been finding the right fit. Cookie factories have minimums that are way off our target size. Smaller factories are better, but because of the economy they are all booming. That’s right, I said booming. The issue is that because of the economy people are eating out less and grocery shopping more. So manufacturers making goods for grocery stores have seen their volumes go way up, and the cost of raw materials go way down. The result? 24/7 factories are running 24/7. No time to stop the production line to do a mandel bread baking test. Beverly Hills and Fairfax have re ordered, but we are on hold until things ease up in the day job to fill the orders. Stay tuned!
Congratulations! You are on the shelves at Whole Foods Market. You have reached your first goal. The next step is to get your product in to more stores. So here’s how this works. Things get progressively easier, because now you have the name of a Leader and a product in a store. You might even ask the Leader of the store carrying your product what other Whole Foods stores your product might sell well at. Most of the Leaders are great folks, they’ll usually refer another store and that stores leader by name. So for store number two, when you walk in ask for the stores Leader by name (remembering they generally work very early in the morning, so 7:00 am sales calls are acceptable). Show the Leader what you have, give him a sample and say something like ‘Eddie (Grocery Leader) over at Beverly Hills is carrying my product and he thought it might sell well here too.” If the Leader of store two agrees to carry your product they’ll have to contact the regional office and get them to connect your product to their store so they can ‘scan the product in’. Meaning the regional office has to make your product that is only visible in the computer of store one, visible in store two. Make sure you get the leaders e-mail address so you can gently remind him to do this for you if nothing happens after a few days. The magic store for you now is store number three. If you can get a third Whole Foods Market to carry your product (usuing the same approach as store two), you can then send a request (by email) to the Whole Foods regional office to be put in the DVO system. What is DVO? This is Whole Foods Market database. If you get in to the DVO system, this means your product is available in the computer region wide. Every Whole Foods Market in your region will see your product in their computer. This doesn’t mean every store is going to order your product. But it does mean that selling becomes easier. All you have to do now is tell the Leader at stores four and beyond that you are in DVO, they can easily place an order online. If they do, you’ll get a DVO order request by e-mail, and you and your amazing product are off to the races!
Up next – Part 7 going big!
So you met a really cool team leader, and he agreed to carry your product. The leader sent your product information over to the regional office and they sent you some information to get you set up for direct deposit. After a few pestering calls and emails to the team leader he finally says “Ok, you’re in our system.” and he places his first order. So now what do you do? First I should clarify something. When the leader puts you ‘in the system’, you are only available in that one Whole Foods Market. You’ll have to check in on how things are selling at the store, and see when he wants to reorder. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. The question you might have next is. How does the delivery work? This is pretty easy. Create duplicate invoices on the computer, there is no standard format, just create something that has the store name and location, and all the order details including price. You’ll also need to come up with some kind of invoice number. I used an abbreviation of the Whole Foods location followed by the date of the delivery. For example, Whole Foods Market Beverly Hills order delivered on March 1st, 2010 invoice number would read WHBVH030110. Take the order to the store, there will always be someone in the back who can sign for your order. Give him a copy to keep (that’s how you get paid!), and keep the signed copy for your records. Whole Foods generally will pay you in about 45 days or less by direct deposit. Next posting, DVO and beyond!
Ok, so you’ve got your great product samples, you’re casually dressed, it’s 7:00 am in the morning and your ready to go to your first Whole Foods Market. First tip, always ask for the team leader. Reason why I say this is because if the leader is not around they will refer you to an assistant leader. Now the assistant leader may be a nice guy or girl (and most are) they do not have purchasing power. So if you leave a sample with an assistant, odds are it will never make it to the leader for a decision. If the team leader is not in, give a sample to the assistant (they will appreciate it), find out when the leader is working and come back with another sample for your team leader.
You can meet the team leader anywhere in the store, don’t feel awkward about standing right in a food aisle presenting to your leader while customers are walking around. If the leader likes your product he will ask you if you are local. ”Yes!” This is the magic answer. Leaders love to support local businesses. He will ask you how you will deliver. ’Direct’ is the correct answer, meaning you will likely drive it yourself to the store. ’Are you in the system?’ The leader will ask. This is a tricky one, because if this is your first store then the only way you can get on the shelves is to have someone in the regional office put you in the system. And the only way you can do that is to have a leader who believes in your product send it over on your behalf. This means you have to be ready with proof of insurance, business docs, bar code, and an ingredients listing sheet that proves all of your ingredients are approved by Whole Foods Market. The regional office will also set you up with direct deposit to get paid. Now the first leader of your first store is going to have to do a lot of work to get you in the system. This guy will launch your entire career at Whole Foods, no other leader will have to work as hard for you as your first leader. Every leader after that is an easier sell. And when you’ve gotten in to three stores you can petition regional to put you in DVO. What is DVO? Google it now to find out, or stay tuned – Next up. First delivery
So unless you are a well heeled super funded food start-up you will unlikely get an audience with your regional Whole Foods market office. There are 11 regions for Whole Foods Market across the United States. Here is a listing of all of them. The best approach for a small start-up is the grass roots approach, which means going store to store, one by one, trying to get them to carry your product. Now not all grocery chains allow this, in fact, most do not. But Whole Foods is different. They like the experience for the shopper to be slightly different at each store. So if you’re local, you’re encouraged to go right to your store and pitch your product. Yeah, it seems a little awkward, but this is the way to do it in the beginning. So here are a few tips before you walk blind in to your local Whole Foods Market.
#1. Whole Foods uses the term, ‘ Leader .’ So never go in and ask for ‘The manager,’ or the ‘The buyer’
If you are trying to sell an item that belongs in the grocery section – go to any cashier and ask for ‘The Grocery Leader.” For bakery, “The Bakery Leader” and so on. The are very informal at Whole Foods, so it’s cool to say ‘Hey, who’s the person I try to sell my stuff too?”
#2. Dress code . Remember, the Grocery Leaders are regular working folks. I find alot more common ground when I’m dressed as casual as they are, usually jeans and a t-shirt. And, if this is your product, your baby, you should go in yourself to show it. The Grocery Leader will respect you for that. Save the fancy clothes and sales teams for when you are big time, when you need to present for national distribution.
#3. Grocery Leaders work early in the morning. The Grocery Leader that I sold Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread too works from 5:30 am to 1:30 pm. This is good news for those of you that have a ‘day job.’ If you don’t mind getting up early, you’ll have a good shot at a face to face with a Grocery Leader before the store usually opens for business, and still have plenty of time to get to your day job. If it’s your first time, don’t be afraid to drive up to the loading dock (usually at the back of the store) and ask for the Leader.
Coming up next. What do I say? What will they ask?
This is also a good time to think about your pricing.
I used google docs to create a spreadsheet of all my costs. I made assumptions on production. For example, if I bake two cases of mandel bread per hour (twelve boxes per case) in the rental kitchen, and the kitchen costs twenty five dollars per hour, then I should expect about one dollar per box to pay for the kitchen rental (twenty-four boxes in one hour equals twenty-four dollars). I used the same model for employees. One ten dollar an hour baker costs me about forty cents per box if they are baking two cases per hour (forty cents per box times twenty four equals nine dollars and sixty cents). For every worker I add another forty cents per box. The cost of product liability insurance is averaged across the ten thousand boxes I was required to purchase. I included a percentage for distribution….cardboard boxes…and of of course raw ingredients. Then add in my profit margin to come up with a wholesale cost. With this type of spreadsheet it is easy to figure out how to lower costs to be more efficient. For example, the price of flour goes down if I buy a larger volume. The eggs are cheaper at Costco than buying through the distributor. And maybe there is a way to streamline the baking so we can bake more than two cases per hour.
Whole Foods Market likes to maintain an average margin of around forty two percent, some items are higher (like bakery), and some slightly lower (like grocery). This means that if you sell your great cookies to Whole Foods Market for four dollars a box, Whole Foods will add around forty two percent mark up or more to come up with their retail price. This is important to consider, because before you dive head first in to your great cookie venture, remember that this is a volume business. Say you go to the store and buy some low priced item like say a Lara Bar for about one dollar and fifty-nine cents. The stores mark up is around sixty-seven cents, which means Lara Bar sells to Whole Foods for about ninety three cents per bar or less. Lara Bar factors in the costs for raw materials, manufacturing, advertising and distribution, and their margins are very low. I’m going to take a guess and say twenty cents cents a bar. So the only way Lara Bar can be successful is to be huge. Which they are of course. You will spend a tremendous amount of time developing and getting your product to market, but until you are a regional, or national – it’s alot of output for a little return. But don’t be discouraged, in 2001 Famous Amos cookies generated an estimated 100 M in sales, in 2001! That’s 100 hundred million! Wally ‘Famous’ Amos himself started as an agent in Hollywood, who would bring homemade cookies to his client meetings, as a calling card. But Wally understood the value of brand, and so you should always think of your product as a great brand, that happens to taste good, instead of just a great recipe that everybody loves. There is no value in a great recipe, but huge potential in a great brand.
My great product!
” My wife makes the best cookies! She could sell them in stores. ” Let’s start from scratch. Getting your great product in to a store like Whole Foods can be challenging, but not impossible. For anyone considering a run at Whole Foods Market you must first check out their list of unapproved ingredients . Make sure your product has none of that stuff, or it will be flat out rejected. And be careful to check sub-ingredients. Aunt Erma’s original recipe mandel bread was made with Nestle mini morsels, but we discovered that Netsle’s mini chips had ‘vanillin’ and not ‘vanilla.’ Vanillin is on Whole Foods unapproved list, so we found a chocolatier (Wilbur Chocolate in Lititz, PA) that made an all natural chip virtually identical in size to Nestle’s. If you are trying to figure out where to print your package, get a nutritional panel,..stuff like that, refer to this blog post for all you ever wanted to know about getting your product ready for the shelves. By the way, when thinking about packaging, think about the way your package will sit on the shelf. If it lies flat, is the logo and item name visible?
Forward:
I don’t know anything about the food business. Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread began at my work computer. Bored from staring at the computer screen all day, I started goofing around in photoshop. I made a fake mandel bread box and a fake web site. Before I knew it I was invited to pitch my package design on CNBC on a show called “The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch.” I had no real package, it was all a fake, just clever photoshop work to make it look real. The mandel bread box Donny held up on TV was printed on my inkjet printer, complete with fake bar code and fake nutritional panel. The mandel bread he tasted was baked by my wife in our kitchen at home. Donny had no idea, but he loved it! By the beginning of 2009 I convinced myself that I should make real boxes, maybe even form a real company. By September of 2009 Aunt Erma’s World Famous Mandel Bread landed its’ first Whole Foods Market, in Beverly Hills. We sold out our first day on the shelves. Today, we are not ‘big time’ not by any stretch. Comfortably holding at four Whole Foods Markets in Los Angeles (for reasons which will be explained later), we are now working with a large cookie manufacturer to try and scale up Aunt Erma’s production to handle not just a few stores, but an entire region. And all of this on a product that most people have never heard of. ’Man dell bread?’ No, it’s ‘mondel bread.’ But say the word mandel bread to a Jewish person and you will stir up nostalgic memories of grandma baking in the kitchen. I heard a great quote from an entrepreneur who said “Your business is a story wrapped around you.” Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread is a story of a long lost recipe, nostalgia, family and home. Never heard of mandel bread? That’s ok, there was a time in American history when no one ever heard of a bagel either. And there was a time in history when no one ever heard of a photocopier. But it was the genius of Xerox to instill their brand so deeply in the American subconscience that today you’re just as likely to say “I need a xerox of this” than “I need a photocopy of this.” If we ever make that leap, if mandel bread ever becomes ubiquitous for ‘a better tasting biscotti,’ I hope that people won’t think ‘mandel bread’, but will think Aunt Erma’s.
No doubt if you’re reading this blog you may have dreamed of bringing your favorite family recipe to market. Is it a cookie? A great BBQ sauce, or the most incredible cakes ever? Well here it is, here’s how I got in. As this story goes so does my little mandel bread company. You will see links in this online guide, mostly too earlier posts from the last two years I have kept this blog. So get your recipe ready, it’s time to hit the shelves!
Phil Weinstein
Founder Aunt Erma’s mandel Bread
The complete online guide…. Coming soon to Team Mandel Blog !
a special thanks to the over 400 hundred unique readers who checked in last month
to read our journey in to the food biz.
Comments are turned off (too much spam) so, if you want to contact me it’s phil@auntermas.com
or on twitter @philweinstein