In the long quest to speed up the baking process we had two custom tools manufactured. One is a custom slicer, it’s manual, but with it we will be able to cut the mandel bread in to even slices that should fit snugly inside the mandel bread box. The second is a type of spatula type thingie that serves a dual purpose, one is to slip a full order of mandel bread quickly into our boxes, and the second to quickly unfold the boxes in preparation to seal them up. Meanwhile, I have just had a bit of communication with Whole Foods So Cal. region – slow slow slow, I’m hoping with the right brokers we can finally ramp up to fill some orders. The original Aunt Erma herself has been back home in Maryland baking batches and packing them in her namesake box and handing out samples. Pretty hip for an 87 year old!
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The web has been great for our business. I found our packaging producer on alibaba.com, use Google Voice for our company phone number, Skyped the 400 meg packaging design photoshop file to Shanghai for printing, Google Ad Words for online advertising, Zen Cart for our online shopping cart system and GetAFreelancer.com to program the site…. But here’s a word of caution regarding GetAFreelancer, after I did the refresh on the AuntErmas site (May 13th blog post), I started to get warning messages from Google that there was malware on my site. I called my web host who said the site was clear, and tried unsuccessfully to contact Google (they have no phone number)… Making things stranger was the fact that the Google Malware Warning only showed up in the Apple Safari browser, not in Firefox or IE. After a week or so of poking around I stumbled on a Google page of someone else having the same problem. A scan of my index files and I noticed that there was a string of text in the code that matched what the guy on google was complaining about. I deleted the text, and the warning messages from Google stopped. So, here’s the deal, if you work with GetAFreelancer, be wary of handing over any kind of ftp access to your site, like I did. And make a back up of your site before anyone get the keys to your site. Additionally, give limited access to your site. Thankfully I only gave access to the AuntErmas part of the site. My animation company is the main domain, and that could have been bad if a hacker got in to there. My little understanding of these trojan malwares is that sometimes they exist on the programmers computer without the owner even knowing it, and when they user accesses an ftp the code writes itself to all the index pages. All is well that ends well, www.auntermas.com is clear — Oh, and Back East Bialy kitchen is nice, not finished but nice…
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We filled our second decent sized order (7 boxes) this week. Meanwhile Silviano at 3D Stainless is making some custom cutting tools for us to help speed up our mandel bread slicing, and he’s making us a spatula that is the exact width of our boxes to fit the mandel bread in to. I met with Moshe at Orel manufacturing in North Hollywood to look at his used equipment – but his used mixers were too big – 160 qt. – We need 30 at the most for right now. Moshe pointed me towards Back East Bakery who apparently has a commercial kosher kitchen available for rent – so we’ll see if that pan out. Next step is a meeting with Jeff and Nancy Cohen too see if the are interested in repping our mandel bread – Hopefully we can get someone to generate sales, then step in to a large rental kitchen, bring in 2 bakers and get to work. One of the kids favorite shows is called “Unwrapped” on the Food Network, they take a look behind the scenes at big food manufacturing. I often wondered where exactly you go to have a huge piece of custom baking equipment made….now I know 2 places right here in LA that do just that. So much different than animation – but really interesting.
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Thanks to one of our very generous mom’s at the kids school, we set out to fill our first official order of mandel bread. 20 boxes. Crystal went back to the rental kitchen and this time managed to get the convection ovens to produce something fairly close to what we’ve been able to do at home. But baking for production brought up other issues. With no way to control the width of the mandel bread, Crystal eye balled the loaf widths, but either the oven factors or an alternate brand of aluminum free baking powder caused the mandel bread to be wider than expected. This meant trying to load 16 pieces per box (as labeled) was almost impossible.
I made a least of the things we’ll need to invest in to make the baking and boxing of the mandel bread more efficient.
#1). A custom spatula exactly the width of our boxes. So we can slip 16 pieces in to the box in one swoop.
#2). A professional mixer – maybe a 20 or 30 qt. Hobart to produce 20 box batches at a time.
#3). A custom slicing tool so we can evenly slice the mandel bread in to exact sized segments to fit in to the box
#4). Some kind of machine to fold and seal the boxes. (this might be something we get down the road…)
Team Mandel Blog Development Countdown
