Still waiting on that announcement I promised a couple of posts back. Meanwhile, after several unsuccessful attempts at getting through to the buyer at Bristol Farms, I finally got them to agree to trying some samples of Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread. I had sent info. packets earlier this year, spoken to grocery store managers, even left several messages at Bristol Farms corporate, but to no avail. I found out the buyers name and took a guess at his email address. My email was simple, ”I have a product that might be good for your stores, if you have a moment, please watch our story.” – followed by a link to that short mini-documentary available on our web site. That did the trick – within a few moments, the buyer emailed back that he liked the story, and was interested in samples. My odds of breaking in to a place like Bristol Farms are slim, but getting some sample product in a key buyers hands was a tiny success, and a another reminder about the similarities between pitching in Hollywood and pitching in the food biz. If they like your story, you’re halfway there.
Here’s my mom and Dad at their 50th wedding anniversary. They look amazing!
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After we bake the mandel bread loaves and create the slices, the ends are thrown away. So thinking about mass production and what to do with all those ends as to not waste them we used the ends to make a cheesecake crust. The cheesecake in this picture is a ricotta cheesecake with Wilbur 10,000 count chips on a mandel bread crust. Dusted with cinnamon sugar on top. Pretty tasty!
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Is coming soon, can’t say just yet what is happening.
On the product development front. We tracked down a local distributor for our Wilbur chips – as luck would have it, the chip we needed was in stock at Divine Specialties in Woodland Hills, considering we were looking at a minimum 3 week delay in getting the chips through another Wilbur distributor this was quite a find. Our custom tool is working great (see June 13th post), but I had to come up with a wood block contraption to help push the product back out of the slicer. It’s a true Rube Goldberg thingie that works, but the block of wood itself is so heavy that I’ve been noticing that pressing on the mandel bread to get it out of the slicer is compressing the mandel bread a bit, which is not cool. So over the weekend I had this idea that maybe the wood block needs to be bevelled a bit so that the wood strips that press on the mandel bread are in concave shape and would press the edges of the mandel bread instead of putting all that weight on top of it. I bought a $5.00 file at the Do-It Center, and this morning fired up another batch – using our all-natural Wilbur chips and ‘viola!’ Seems like we finally nailed it!! This mandel bread is the closest to what we make at home, and ready for mass-production.
Picked up some case packing boxes at Absolute Packaging – great prices, and a case box and foam only adds about a nickel to our per box cost. Never thought I’d get so excited about cardboard.
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