Mid-Winter Cool Down

Last year at this time, I was attending the Saco River Market on Saturdays.  This was keeping me extremely busy, both with the business, as well as with the kiddos.  While I was always way more successful in school when I was super busy and my life was full of scheduled sports events, school work, and hobbies, as a mother that has all changed.  When I get into full on PB&J (and I don't mean sandwiches) mode, I'm barely capable of thinking about anything else.  I worry about every detail and hardly think about what's for dinner.  Joe is extremely helpful, and while he commutes to Newington daily, working a 40 - 50 hour week, plus traveling, he comes home cheerful and ready to intercept the kids and stir the peanut butter.  Anyway, this winter I opted out of the Saco market, deciding to focus more on our family, being a mom, and creating traditions in our home.  We didn't sign the girls up for anything this winter, as our plan is to be active with them all winter as a family.  So far so good on that. We're loving snowshoeing together, sledding, playing games, and eating dinner together every night at the actual dinner table.

It's not to say that I'm not working, 'cause I'm working.  I have several new retail accounts locally, as well as we are building our peanut butter business substantially beyond where we were a year ago.  It's seemingly little things like changing up containers, labeling, official food testing, and other related boring stuff that take up of tons of time.  We plan to be in this for the long haul, so doing it right is our goal.  Also, it is pretty fun.  Why would I do this otherwise?  I love it.

Currently I'm working with a local label company to come up with a more efficient process by which we will label our peanut butter jars-- without changing our rustic look and attitude.  This is a challenge, but a fun one.  I'm used to printing our labels as I need them.  Not only is this not cost effective, but it takes quite a long time.  So no more of that!  Sorry HP, we'll stick with you for the jam (no pun intended) for now, but the PB is hitting the high road.  Here's what our label looks like currently, just so you have a before shot.

The other cool thing about having labels printed is that they (the company) can easily include important stuff like nutritional information, a bar code (oooooooh, big time!), and other things beyond me, like the Maine Made seal (yep, I'm proudly one of them now), and Get Real, Get Maine info.  Basically, they can take care of placement details that this shmo (me) can't.  It's what they do.  Anyway, I'm psyched to be able to share it with you, spread the PB all over Maine (pun definitely intended on that one), and have fun doing it.