Hi, everyone! I’m way overdue for an update. First, I want to tell you all a little about the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, which my brother/partner and I attended in January. It was exhausting but not nearly to the extent of the way larger show last summer in New York, and it helped a lot that the two of us were working together this time. It was interesting to see the trends in the food industry. There are a lot of products now that are low-sugar or have no sugar added, including hot sauces and jams, organic is in, and there was also an emphasis on gluten-free products from purveyors of foods for which that’s relevant - and some for which it’s not.
Some highlights: Cane Land has a big sugar cane plantation in Louisiana and makes fantastic dark and spiced rums and wonderful rum cake. They don’t make hot sauce or condiments, but they do make spiced rum pecans that are a nice snack. There were several other purveyors of delicious flavored peanuts and other nuts - a personal favorite was the Everything Goes Nuts by Bobby Sue’s Nuts from Chappaqua, New York, whose flavoring is meant to be like everything bagels, but I like it more than those. There was another booth giving pours of excellent Italian red and white wines. Of course it’s a good idea not to drink too much wine and rum while you’re working, and we didn’t! We also tried some rich dark chocolates made with hot peppers. We enjoyed the Sardinian cheese booth - Pecorino Sardo is a very good cheese. And Essendorfer, the Bavarian company I mentioned last winter, came back to the San Francisco Fancy Food Show with a whole bunch of additional products, all of which were excellent.
There were a couple of organic hot sauce makers we liked that are making sauces with only a few ingredients that really depend on flavorful peppers, and the ones we liked best are made by a vineyard in Napa that also grows their own unusual hot peppers. They were funny - their hot sauces weren’t displayed, because they were emphasizing other products like flavored olive oils and wines, but when we asked them if they had anything else, they said “We have some hot sauces, if you’d have any interest in that.”
Also while visiting San Francisco, I tried a bunch of sauces my brother picked up on trips to Europe and Japan. We particularly liked a number of sauces from Japan. For example, we loved a condiment of fried onions and garlic with chili, a roasted red chili soy sauce, a seven spices miso with kombu and a crunchy, garlicky wasabi oil furikake sauce, meant to be used to flavor rice.
I also have a bit of fairly exciting news: We just started advertising on Facebook. Right now, our main aim is to determine which of a number of possible company names seems to be most popular, but because we tested 4 ads against each other, we also have had somewhat of a chance to compare their effectiveness in attracting people to go to our landing page and leave their emails for us to contact them when we’re sending out information about subscriptions. We also have the lineup of products for our first deliveries to our subscribers planned out. When we’re ready to take subscriptions, I’ll post a link to the URL here, for anyone who might be interested. Wish us luck in continuing to advertise and try to find customers for our subscription service!
