The Kitchen

Near Term:

• More wheat-y flavor on Original crackers
• Stronger flavor for Everything and Cinnamon & Sugar crackers
• BYOB for all shapes of pasta
• BYOB for crackers (except nacho)

Medium Term:

• Ordering a single box of crackers for sampling
• Cheese, nacho, and sour-cream and onion flavored crackers

Long Term:

• Chocolate crackers
• More pasta shapes

With regard to the cheese crackers, I was finally able to see the set up, and we've decided it really isn't possible to add the oil topping post-bake. This is going to make it tricky to do various cracker toppings, as we'd originally planned, since the oil is necessary to make the toppings stick. We can't add it pre-bake, or the oil will smoke and burn in the oven.

So we're going to go back to the drawing board and try to make cheese-flavored crackers after all. They can't be quite like our old cheese crackers because the new plant can't laminate the crackers, only sheet them. It's also difficult to do the 2-stage fermentation. However, we hope to find some cheese flavors which can substitute for the latter, and maybe people won't miss the former? Experimentation is in order. But this time we're going to just do a single 600-lb batch, bulk pack it with no printed packaging, and sell it online to gauge feedback before we do a full-scale production. So, stay tuned again!

I'm sitting at DFW airport, having just finished the first leg of my trip back from the cracker plant, and waiting for my connecting flight. It was a good visit, and in addition to finally putting some faces to some names, we were able to do new full-scale productions of each our three current crackers (Original, Everything, and Cinnamon & Sugar) with the new, more flavorful formulations.

The everything was excellent with 2% of the mix put inside the dough instead of on top where it wasn't sticking so well. It already had a lot more flavor, and didn't negatively impact the sheeting of the dough or texture of the final product. We're actually so confident that we're bumping the mix inside the dough up to 3% for the next production. This ones a real winner.

The cinnamon & sugar had a similar change, with some cinnamon and sugar moving inside the dough, as well. It had a major impact! You could really see how the cinnamon flavor was altering the flavor and color even before baking. Smelled wonderful coming out of the oven, and the new flavor impact is powerful. I can actually smell the cinnamon coming out of the samples I brought in my carry-on right now. Another home run, we think.

The only one where the change was more subtle was the Original. Here we were constrained by the ingredients on the labeling, which didn't allow us to re-introduce the onion powder, which had added some pungent notes that people liked. However, we feel that rebalancing the ratios of some other ingredients - in particular, increasing wheat germ and molasses at the expense of some flour - altered the flavor profile, and eliminated some aftertaste notes. It definitely has more of a wheat-y feel to it. Still might need some work done, but there is definite progress.

Stay tuned, and we'll let you know when the new production is shipping.

We have a confirmed shipping date for the pasta on 11/21, so we're putting them back on the website for you to pre-order if you'd like. We're hoping to have the new crackers reconfirmed very soon, also.

So I got an e-mail a little while ago from a law firm which had filed a class-action lawsuit against UPS for their over-size dimensional adjustments. Basically, they allege UPS has been overcharging their customers by mismeasuring packaging and then adjusting our shipping charges accordingly. UPS denies this, but they came to a settlement (lawyers probably did nicely on that). We do a lot of shipping via UPS, so this is relevant for us.

The question is, when filling out the claim form, how much did UPS overcharge? Fortunately, I've saved every PDF invoice UPS has prepared for us since January of 2008. These invoices each contain a line saying how much of a dimensional adjustment was applied. Unfortunately, there are over 300 such invoices to go through!

So I whipped up a little program to figure it out. It turns each PDF into plain-text using the PDFBox library. Then, since they're all very standard, it looks for a particular string of text next to the adjustment amount and turns that into a number, which it then adds up.

Although the law firm just asked for the total adjustment amount, we felt that some of UPS's adjustments were probably legit, so we reduced the amount charged by 1/3. Not sure if we'll actually see any or all of this settlement, but it would be cool if we did.

If anyone does a lot of UPS shipping and would like to use my program, you can download the ZIP file containing it and all the libraries here.