Monthly Archives: September 2017

September 8, 2017 · 8:43 am

Our Daily Bread

I was struck, this Foodie Friday, by an article written for the Civil Eats site about how much bread is wasted. I don’t mean financial resources. This is actual bread: loaves, bagels, even donuts. As the piece states:

There’s also the fact that, except in the most exclusive bakeries, a bare shelf is a no-no. Customers expect fresh bread and lots of it. Sugar and fat are also relatively inexpensive, so it is safer to make too much and donate the leftovers than it is to risk running out.

Apparently, it’s a worldwide epidemic, caused, in part, by the growth of factory bread. You know: mass-produced loaves that taste like nothing and are full of fat, carbs, and not much else. Putting aside the quality of the products, I hate waste in all of its forms but particularly when it comes to food. Yes, there are people in this country and around the world who are starving, but I don’t think for a minute that the food either you or I throw out is taken from their mouths. I also get that the statement is more a reminder to be thankful for what we have. What’s lost in idly tossing out food or giving away a bakery’s excess is something I learned from both my friend’s grandmother who taught me to cook and from watching Jacques Pepin on TV.

Nothing is to be wasted. Old bread becomes breadcrumbs or a panade to round out meatballs or a meatloaf. Maybe it’s even the star of a Panzanella. Top mac and cheese with fresh breadcrumbs. Veggie trimmings can be collected and used to make broth, as can shrimp shells or meat trimmings. Ground beef generally is, in fact, meat trimmings.Find some Jacques Pepin videos on YouTube and you’ll be struck by how everything he has is used somehow, even as a garnish.

Bakeries might need to do a better job of managing their dough, but so do we. The kitchen mantra of wasting nothing needs to apply to every business. I once saw the events group at the NHL dragging full garbage bins. They were tossing the contents of their closet which contained event signs and other stuff. We turned their garbage into a million dollar auction business. Nothing is wasted.

What if the bakeries and supermarkets changed the paradigm? What if empty shelves were a sign of an in-demand, high-quality product? What if they made less? Great BBQ places run out of food in hours. It sure makes projecting your P&L a lot easier when you know that you’ll sell everything you make. Sure, you’re losing a bit of upside by running out, but how does that compare with what you’re wasting? Food for thought!

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September 5, 2017 · 9:51 am

Getting Fitted Correctly

I hope you all had a relaxing Labor Day and were able to indulge in one or more of your favorite activities. I did, and doing so reminded me of some very basic things each of us needs to keep in mind as we leave Summer and get back to business.

I spent $99 for a process known as a full bag fitting. Yes, it’s golf-related (hey – you write what you know, right?). It’s a process in which you go through the various types of clubs in your bag while hitting balls using a launch monitor. I’m not going to get technical but it’s basically a tool that shows you everything you’d ever want to know about how the club is performing and allows you to change club brands and components to improve the results. My fitting was scheduled for two hours with a wonderful Irish golf pro named Martin. Here are some of the things I noticed that apply to you and your business.

  1. Go beyond expectations. I’ve gone through this process before and it was fairly clinical. Hit the ball, watch the result, change the club a little, rinse, repeat. Martin was personable and non-judgemental (there were quite a few horrible shots). Where he really went beyond expectations was in giving me little swing tips as we went. A minor grip change and a slight change in my address position had me striking the ball more solidly. I went to have my clubs checked and fitted and he went beyond that by checking me too.
  2. Be human. We hear a lot about bots – automated processes – taking over a lot of tasks these days, particular customer services. I suppose as I think about it, this process could have been fairly automated as well. The bot could have used the numbers to have me change out club shafts or heads until the numbers were optimized. What it couldn’t do was give me the feedback Martin did. He ignored data from what were occasional bad swings and only used the numbers from the normal ones. Most importantly, by the time we got to hitting driver, the last type of club left, I had hit close to 300 shots. I was tired and my swing was breaking down. Martin saw it after I was unable to hit anything normally. Rather than continue and give a good analysis of a faulty, tired swing, Martin suggested I go away for a couple of hours and recover. At this point, we were already over the 2 hour time but he said we’d do the driver analysis later for no charge. That’s something no bot would suggest.
  3. Communicate effectively. The monitor spits out a lot of very complicated data. Even though I know what most of it means, Martin took the time to be sure that I was interpreting the data correctly and understood how the changes we were making were improving the result, even when the visual representation of the ball flight looked off.

After two trips to the monitor bay and a total of three hours, I left with a list of club specifications that will hopefully translate into better play. More importantly, I left with an appreciation of how any of us can keep customers happy and solve the cost/value equation. Make sense?

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September 1, 2017 · 9:23 am

Weenies!

It’s the start of the college football season this Foodie Friday and that means weenies. You may call them pigs in a blanket but my daughter and I, who are aficionados of them, refer to them as weenies. One football Saturday several years ago we heated up a tray to watch our favorite team play (Go Blue!) and have never looked back. They are a staple of our game day experience and we’re so serious about them that we have tried just about every brand we could find. We learned a few things, some of which have to do with your business as well.

The first thing we learned was that these are one of those foods that are just as good bought frozen as making them yourself. It’s not that they taste appreciably better from the store but the effort required to roll out the puff pastry and properly size either the cut pastry or the hot dog doesn’t yield a dramatic improvement over the best of the store-bought products. That’s an important business thought as well, as we return to the old cost/value equation. For consumers to choose to use your product or service to solve their problem, you need to provide a better return on their investment of time and/or money. In this case, the final results of our homemade weenies took a fair amount of effort that wasn’t a significantly better solution.

Next, we learned that not everyone’s concept of what a weenie should be is the same. We bought versions that were bland hot dogs in buttery puff pastry. Some pastry was dense, almost biscuit-like. Some had parmesan cheese rolled in. Some folks even try to pass off a bagel wrap as an acceptable option. Ha! None were perfect. We found that we loved one brand’s hot dog and another brand’s pastry. Yes, it crossed our minds to buy both and combine the best parts, but our top choice has decent enough pastry to negate the Frankenweenie from happening. But the business point is that you can call your product whatever you want, even a fairly common name, but not everyone is going to think of it in the same way. I think the IHOP even calls sausages wrapped in pancakes pigs in a blanket. That’s definitely NOT what we have in mind to munch whilst watching college football.

Present your product clearly. Excel at solving the cost/value equation from the consumer’s perspective. That’s a dish worth eating every time.

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