Holiday!

My apologies for the lack of updates. We have been very busy getting ready for the holiday season, so the blog will be on hiatus till after Christmas.

We have been doing a lot of exciting things lately at Month Club Store:

• With Olive, Pickle, Pickled Veggie and Peanut Butter of the Month Club, we have improved our offering by allowing customers to choose between one or two different selections each month - can you imagine 24 different jars of pickles over twelve months?
• We have lined up quite a few new and exciting vendors for our clubs and are pleased to continue improving the quality of our selections.
• We hope to introduce a few new clubs in the coming weeks, but just don't have anything finalized just yet.

It has been an interesting year for us on costs. Many of our food vendors raised prices because their ingredients costs went up and shipping costs spiked due to increased fuel costs (its interesting that these seem to go up right away when the gas prices go up, but don't seem to come down very fast when gas prices go down).

In the face of this, we have been fortunate to hit some decent volume levels and be able to streamline many processes. So we have actually kept our costs level or in some cases, lowered our costs in the past year. And while we see some of competitors raising their prices, we have not raised any of our prices and in some cases, we have lowered our prices.

Oh - and an update on SoupsOnline.com: we are now offering over 400 different soup mixes. 400!!

So Merry Christmas everyone! Check back in 2009 for more reviews on our featured products!

Lasagna Chips

For our Snack of the Month Club, we typically feature what we are featuring from some of our snack clubs like potato chips, pretzels, chips & salsa, popcorn, nuts, etc. But every few months we find a snack that doesn't really fit in with any of our other categories. Lasagna Chips are one such item.

A mother nicknamed “Lainie” founded this company in 1988. She created Lasagna Chips out of a need for her son who was hyperactive (ADD) and sensitive to the preservatives, additives, artificial colors and flavors in snack foods available. “I found it necessary to create an all natural snack for him in my kitchen. Not only did he like it, so did all his friends as well! It was the biggest seller at the cake sales at school. Next, their parents were asking me to prepare a batch for their parties. Eventually, after many suggestions to open my own business, I did. And so “Lainie's Lasagna Chips” was born."

When her idea got so big that she couldn't keep up anymore, she inlisted the help of A&J Snacks - they were the original creator of the now famous New York Bagel Chips. Lasagna Chips are now available in four varieties: Sea Salt, Barbecue, Original Garlic & Oregano and my favorite, Tomato Basil.

Halladay's Harvest Barn

Halladays sits on a hill, in Vermont, overlooking the beautiful Connecticut River Valley. Open since 1895 on a terrace of beautiful Victorian homes, Halladays has evolved into a thriving specialty herb producer, greenhouse & gift shop.

Halladays Harvest Barn produces on site the famous line of Harvest Barn specialty foods. Products include unusual blends such as garlic chipolte, chardonnay and tomato basil herb mixes, no bake cheesecakes including tiramisu and key lime, and delicious infused garlic oils & vinegars.

In August we featured several of their items for our Dip/Cheeseball of the Month Club including their Double Chocolate Amaretto and Pineapple Chipotle Cheeseball mixes and their Italian Mushroom and Boursin Cheese Dip mixes.

In addition, we also added their entire line of soup mixes to Soups Online. Their soup mixes are wonderful and unique. Perfect for two, these soups mixes are reasonably priced at $3.99.

Spacey Tracy's Pickles

Spacey Tracy's products originated out of her kitchen a decade ago as gifts to her friends and local taverns. The word spread and the rest is history!

She got started with canned pickles, eventually adding pickled veggies, jellies and most recently, fried dill pickles.

Her product line has dominated the list of awards at the Rosendale International Pickle Festival the past few years with offerings such as her Garlicy Dill Pickles, Sweet & Spicy Sunshine Pickles and her Garlicy Dill Carrots. We recently featured the Garlicy Dills for our Pickle of the Month Club and the Garlicy Carrots for the Pickled Veggie of the Month Club.

If you would like to try her products, you can give her a call to place an order at 845-876-8083 or check out her website (note: at the time of this post, her site was 'under construction' and not taking orders). You can also get her pickles by joining the Pickle of the Month Club as we will be featuring them annually.

Wolfie's Nuts

As a young boy stomping around the old West End of Findlay, Ohio, William "Wolfie" Wolf was lucky enough to live near Mrs. "Maggie" Phillips' old white two-story house. Her first floor was a small store. It was a child's dream with its old creaky wooden floors, comic books, penny candy, and an aroma of fresh roasted nuts. For a returnable pop bottle he could get a small bag of those warm redskins or delicious cashews.

He eventually came to own the store and expand it into a thriving business all the while keeping a focus on the small batch, home-made quality that made Maggie's nuts so special.

But it was in 1996 that Wolfie along with brothers Don and Hillis Schieber began producing Fire Roasted Crunchy Nuts. Don and Hillis discovered this unique recipe/process in "Old Mexico", brought the recipe home, patented the process and then got together with Wolfies to exclusively produce these delicious nuts.

So what makes these Fire Roasted Crunchy Nuts so special? Always working in batches of no more than 25 pounds, they start by coating the nuts by hand with a mixture that, when roasted, adds the “crunchy” to the nuts. From there, they dry-roast them over an open flame (with no added oils!), then add one final coating … the secret recipe that will make your mouth sing!

These unique and delicious nuts are in our regular rotation with our Nut of the Month Club though we rotate year over year between cashews, almonds and several varieties of peanuts.

Laurie’s Kitchen

Speaking of soups.... one of our regular Soup of the Month Club featured companies is Laurie's Kitchen. Laurie's is part of Old World Spices based in Kansas City, Missouri.

Old World got it's start in 1988 when John Jungk founded Industrial Ingredients Supply. As the name implies, they provided bulk product for food manufacturers. Over time, they began to focus more and more on spices and seasonings and in 1996 changed the name to Old World Spices & Seasonings. It was in 1999 that they launched a line of branded gourmet mixes that was headed up by Jungk's eldest daughter Laurie Corbin.

Sadly, Laurie passed on unexpectedly at the age of 38 in 2001. To remember her, the family business set out to create a whole new line of gourmet mixes that were truly inspired by her home cooking. They named the line Laurie's Kitchen and it launched in 2006. They now offer a complete line of mixes for soup, dips, cheeseballs, desserts, vinaigrettes and sauces.

We have featured several of their products for our month clubs and now offer the full line of soup mixes at http://www.soupsonline.com/.

Soup's On!!!

Thank you loyal readers for your patience! There is a reason I've been slow to update the blog lately. Myself and our entire staff have been working feverishly over the past two months preparing an entirely new website dedicated to soups!

We've just launched http://www.soupsonline.com/. It is the largest collection of gourmet soup mixes that you can find anywhere (online or otherwise). For starts, we have over 200 soup mixes from over 30 vendors but we anticipate that growing to over 350 soup mixes from over 40 vendors by the Fall.

The product listings on the site are incredibly informative with great descriptions, complete ingredients lists, directions, alternate uses, nutrition facts and product reviews. Here is one of my favorite soups: Chicago French Bistro French Onion Soup.

It is also easy to shop with a very detailed categorization that allows you to search by type (chili mixes, broths, chowders, etc.), ingredients (asparagus, corn, mushroom, potato, etc.), ethnicity (Italian Soups, Southwestern Soups, Cajun Soups, etc.), season or dietary need. We even have sections for "just add water" soups, crock pot friendly soups and single serving soups.

I know, soup in the dead of summer? We launched at this time so we could get any bugs worked out and really tweak the site in time for the Fall.

Here is the best part - for the readers of my blog, you can get 10% off through the end of August by entering the coupon code "gfrblog" at checkout. There is also free shipping available on larger orders. So take a look and tell all your friends that "Soup's on!"