Well another few weeks have passed, I'm blog slacking!!! It has been a serious whirlwind of a fortnight, and I'm very pleased and proud to say we are now supplying several village shops, petrol stations and one very large farm shop with our sausages and black pudding!! Our packaging was a nightmare and is still problematic - serves me right for not wanting plastic coated poly trays really! Cardboard is not a great friend of sausage, it tends to want to mush, or leak or do anything other than behave really!!! Up until the night before our supply date, we had film windows full of mist, until my wonderful butcher discovered that putting a moisture removing pad inside the box sorts this!!! And then the labeling, god what a challenge! Who knew it could be so difficult!!
The new burgers are also now in the shop, we have melting middle lamb and beef burgers and new recipe beef burgers which are a good improvement on the previous ones. However, at one point last week, we had Mozzarella spelt 4 different ways in the shop!!! We have also entered into a deal with the cinema in town to advertise in their catalogue, giving us 2 free cinema tickets per week to be won in the shop - it means that once a week, we will advertise a film and time (mainly a Thursday night) and anyone spending over £10 in the shop can enter their name and number into a box to try to win the tickets - we will then pick a name out of the box and they pick their tickets up!
We also have lots of new things going on in the shop - new delicious biscuits, cakes and bread, freshly brewed coffee and salads which are going down a treat! Look out for sausage and bacon rolls in the mornings soon and more local produce, oh and homemade pease pudding, potted meats and soup!!! Phew, as you can imagine, our staff are a little shell shocked by all this change - but coping amazingly well with it all. We have turned sausage making Tuesdays into the day from hell - by Tuesday evening the back of the shop is one large sausage factory, the staff look like they've been to war and there are so many sausages hanging in the cold room we could give Walls a run for their money!!!
I often sit and think about the changes that have happened to me since April, its really quite amazing that 3 months ago I was just a scientist from London and now I'm running around the Northumberland hills flogging sausages to shops and getting excited over coffee and jam!!! I am really enjoying the challenge and have so much more lined up over the next few months, including a shop re-vamp (paint and re-organising furniture to start with).....
Also, look out for our exciting new veg boxes and beautiful range of children and baby meals developed by a local. These will be so new and exciting, we will have every baby and child in Northumbelrand wanting their mum to take them to Wark!!!
Next big thing coming up is our lamb from Roses Bower, the clock is ticking for those bouncy lambs currently enjoying the grass on the farm - this year we hope to get as many as possible into the shop rather than selling at mart.
On a different subject, I came first class to London this week - what a nice journey!! Virgin staff feed and water you and there is space to put things down without pelting an unsuspecting business man with my womanly wares!!! I had lemonade and did some work, I even had a snooze - quite obviously, I am going to need to find a sponsor who will allow me to come first class to London in future in exchange for sausages.... any offers??
Looking forward to the BBQ on the 10th Aug, I will of course be bringing our products to the party, I will work on some crazy recipes to get everyone talking!!
This week we have the seriously popular Stilton and asparagus sausage back on the market - but we have a relief butcher in for the next 2 weeks who is luckily also called Alan (this helps with my terrible name memory recall) who has some amazing recipes up his butchers apron. I am hoping we can do some crazy sausage trials this week and emerge with some flavours to tempt even the fussiest mouths!!
Right, must go in search of lunch, over and out,
Cx
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