The Kitchen

We sometimes get requests from non-profits that would like us to supply some free samples of our products for their events. It's a win-win where they get to give their participants cool new products, and we get some inexpensive advertising.

We recently sponsored two events. One was a walk to raise money for the Arthritis Foundation, specifically for "Team Princess Taylor". The other was the Great North Contest, which IIRC is a competition of body builders. See if you can guess which pictures are from which event...

Event 1:

Event 2:

Good luck guessing. And If you'd like us to sponsor food at your event, just drop us a line.

We recently had an issue with some people receiving the wrong orders because of packing slip mix-ups. Given that our packing slips identifiers consisted of nothing but strings of numbers, which sometimes differed from each other by just one digit, this was understandable.

To correct this issue, we're now switching to packing slip id's that take the form of the customer's last name, plus the last 3 digits of the order number to distinguish between 2 (or more) Smith's who order on one day. Hopefully this will reduce the incidence of shipping errors.

We recently launched a "Trial Size Box" program which let you order a single box of pasta or crackers. Unfortunately, we ran into some issues with duplicate shipments, and had to take it down just a few days after it went up. We're working to resolve those issues and should have it running again later this week. Thanks for your patience.

It was recently brought to my attention that the menu's on our site weren't working in IE8. We had tested it in early versions of IE, and in Firefox, and they worked fine, but surprisingly IE8 broke Microsoft's own ASP.NET Menu Control (unless it's in Compatability Mode, but that's basically the same as earlier versions of IE and very kludgy).

Fortunately, I found that Microsoft was aware of the issue and had even issued a patch for it. Unfortunately, our webhosting provider hadn't applied it at the time. I contacted them and we went back and forth for a bit (first they denied the menu's were broken; then they said they were broken, but it was clearly our fault; and finally they patched it, but insisted it was still broken on our site!). After some testing on different computers, it looks to me like it's working just fine. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

In addition to our new Trial-Size Box, here's another easy way to tell if you're going to like a product you see on our website but haven't tried yet: take someone else's word for it

Studies have shown that the best way to find out whether a certain choice will make you, personally, happy is to get the opinion of other people who have made the same choice. If they liked their choice, chances are you will, too.

With that in mind, you might want to check out our page of Raves & Reviews, featuring what other people and websites have said about our products. All the Reviews contain links back to the original website which reviewed us* (most recently, some kind words from Healthful Bites). So check them out, and happy snacking!

* I only mention that because I knew someone whose job was composing fake customer reviews for a website she worked for. Shocking, I know.

Sorry for the gap in blog posts, getting married will do that to ya...

Anyway, I just wanted to pop back in and let you know that our cheese crackers are now available as a (free) snack on most JetBlue flights!

We know we'll be on there until the end of November, and if things go well (i.e., feedback is good and their passengers keep asking for more, more, more!) we might even be there permanently. So if you fly JetBlue this month, be sure to ask for the healthiest snack in the sky - FiberGourmet.

FiberGourmet is running its biggest sale of the year! Here's the story:

A few months ago I met an incredible woman, B. She’s beautiful, intelligent, warm – I could go on forever, but the important thing is that I fell in love with her. Last week I asked her for her hand in marriage and, wonder of wonders, she said yes. This put me in such a euphoric mood that I wanted to share it with all of our customers in the form of a huge sale on FiberGourmet’s entire line of reduced-calorie, high-fiber products.

To take advantage of the discount, simply go to our website and enter the coupon code SheSaidYes at checkout to save 15% on your our order! But hurry, the “honeymoon” for this sale ends on Thursday night at 11:59 PM.

Euphorically yours,
Ari
VP, FiberGourmet

P.S: You can congratulate the bride by signing our guestbook.

• Recipe name (the cuter the better! :)
• Ingredients
• Instructions
• Number of servings

I got a nice package in the mail today from Maressa at First Magazine. Looks like our Mac & Cheese was featured in this month's issue - go pick up a copy at your local supermarket! And I'm referring to both the magazine and the mac & cheese.

It was serendipitious timing, since we recently re-vamped our site layout to feature both the magazine reviews and submitted recipes more prominently.

Oh, and on that note, stay tuned for the announcement of the winner of our penne recipe contest later tonight!

P.S: If you're puzzled by the title to this entry, congratulations on avoiding one of the sillier Slashdot memes. ;)

Our offices will be closed from April 8 - April 16 for inventory and a staff vacation. Since we won't be shipping during that time, we're offering a 15% discount on all orders placed before then, using the coupon-code: VACATION15