Christmas season positives and negatives in your business.

[VanKalkerFarms]

Well, Christmas was yesterday so many may not fully be thru the Hollidays, but what's been a positive and a negative thing this year for you?

Did you see delivery issues, have a great customer feedback, weather issues, bigger sales volume than you expected, etc?

[VanKalkerFarms]

We had a major issue at our bakeries, something we have never really ran into at a scale this large.   We own 3 of the 13 franchises in our Bakery franchise.   Something in one of the ingredients of the cherry pie filling seems to have off or wrong as the appearance ended up being more of a almost thick jelly consistency in the end after baking than the more typical appearance so we ended up dumping over 500 large pies and running a separate run.  It tasted fine and all but just did not give the look we wanted and expected,  So that is a whole investigation now into was there an issue with an ingredient and is it a larger problem or was there a batching issue (which seems more likely overall, but also not as it was across 4 people making the filling and they all seem to have the same end result).  

But on the positive side, across our 3 stores sales were up 19% on donuts and 13% on baked. goods for Monday and Tuesday.

[Tom]

Hey @VanKalkerFarms — hope you had a great Christmas and glad to hear that sales were on the up & up!

That’s rough about the pie filling. I had a similar experience at my go-to neighborhood spot. They got a soda fountain shipment with iced tea that was way too sweet — like, truly intolerable. 🙃 It took a few weeks to sort out, but the owner eventually got it comped. Hopefully, they can get things resolved quickly for you!

[CareyJo]

Our positive was that we had less emergencies to deal with over the holiday and actually got to enjoy our time off and not feel like it was just another day.  We had a pretty light week that week and it was nice.

The only negative is the same one we always have - people think "just stop by one day next week, when you have time".  I've become a broken record, constantly telling people that is not an option.  I'm so tired of people thinking that we have nothing to do and we're just sitting around, especially after they say "I know how busy Rich is" and they all know we do not have employees!  We're booked til March.  People just don't get it!