IN my early 20s I put myself through a chocolatier’s course.
Not just because I loved the stuff.
No, I had a plan. A master plan. A master plan of world domination – from Lake Boga.
Where my primary weapon of mass marketing would be my chocolate.
But things never really did go to plan.
Thirty years later, however, and the dream may have dimmed slightly, but the fire has never gone out.
Which is why we have a meeting with one of the big supermarket chains in three weeks to discuss our chocolate milk.
Bit scary.
Bit exciting.
Definitely need to put my big boy pants on for this one.
Being realistic, supermarkets are bombarded with businesses trying to get products on their shelves.
Even if we get through the first meeting, the next product review for them isn’t until October.
Get through that one and it could be early next year before a single product hits a shelf.
I am not building my expectations too high. We are going to prepare well and put our best foot forward.
But I’m only estimating our chances about one in five!
As with most things, it will come down to pricing and logistics (just quietly though, we are pretty amazing, so maybe that lifts our chances just a tad).
Going to also make an apology today – we are no longer able to access the one litre milk bottles we have been using.
Essentially, unless you buy multiple B-double loads of milk bottles, you’re a waste of space to the bottle supplier, and we have again been discarded quicker than you can say “goodness, gracious me”.
In England, nearly all the one litre and 500mm milk bottles have handles on them, and I just thought that was really convenient for little kids or more mature people, to have a handle to hang onto to for convenient pouring.
Nevertheless, we are now sourcing a bottle from South Australia, which will come pre-labelled (big plus for us) but no handle (no kind of plus for you). Sorry.
The bottle supplier calls it a “scround” which is a combination of square and round. Might see if I can sneak that word into Scrabble with the kids and see if I can get away with it.
Our quality testing results in the milk enhancement centre had not been ideal for the past few months, with low levels of psychrotrophic bacteria, and even the odd coliform sneaking in (still miles below a fail level) and we had been struggling to isolate the problem.
It ended up being our brand new, top-shelf, stainless-steel food-grade milk pump (how could anything go wrong with that many adjectives?). As soon as we went back to our old el cheapo job, those problems went away.
On the farm we are still coming second, but I do think we are turning a corner. The grass is growing well, the new season has been kind and while we might have missed out on summer, autumn is tracking well.
The Kerang farm got fully submerged in October and there has been a bit of effort knocking that back into shape.
We are not going to milk cows there again, we will run young stock and try to grow crops instead – timing is critical and we are running two weeks late already.
I think we have just blown up our big tractor on the eve of seeding, so that’s pretty annoying. But one can only be patient and do the best you can.
World domination doesn’t happen overnight, anytime in the next decade will be fine.
