Spoke to Joe Sembler this morning at Fantasy Cookie Company. They bake about 75 tons of product a week in a 60,000 square foot facility in Sylmar. Joe’s shop is KOF-K kosher. We had a discussion about product volume (he needs a minimum 7000 lbs. to work at his place). He suggested we try Greens Bakery in Canoga Park for kosher baking, and he also suggested FOOD TOOLS in Santa Barbara for baking specialty baking equipment, including biscotti baking machines. Joe felt like we need rack ovens to bake our mandel bread, while he has band ovens
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Yesterday, Crystal and I had another meeting with our SCORE counselor Larry Schwimmer over at the SBA. Crystal and I discussed the difficulty we’ve had securing a first order. Mr. Schwimmer suggested we try starting with smaller businesses locally and followed up with lots of good local leads. This is something Crystal and I had discussed earlier too. This means we’re going to produce our first round of packages which will probably be a commitment of 2500 to 5000 boxes. We will be spending money on nutritional analysis and labeling, kosher certification, and using our packaging broker to produce the packages to food industry specifications. Larry also thought we would be excellent candidates for a local program called the ‘Jewish Free Loan Program’ – a loan program offered to entrepeneurs in the Los Angeles area. They offer interest-free, fee-free loans to start up companies in LA.
Meanwhile, we received another call, from a woman in New Jersey, who was trying to place an order, and the web site has topped 11,000 hits. When the boxes get in we’ll finally be able to fill the few calls we are getting off the internet.
The shopping cart system we use called ‘Zen-Cart’ put our site on their featured sites area of their web site. You can check that out here.
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