"Thank you for you!"

To distract myself from getting too obsessed with sending out boxes of granola, I took some time to look through our checkbook this morning.

So far, with your help, the Providence Granola Project has paid about $9,000 in salaries this year and provided approximately 1,000 hours of job experience/training for new refugees. This on top of the fact that 5 out of 6 of our refugee employees have gone on to “real” jobs. When I compare this to the some of the Department of Human Service programs (that I help refugees access in my day job) it’s not bad at all. It wouldn’t be abnormal for the state to pay nearly $4,000 to provide an initial job training/experience for one welfare client—and this comes with no guarantees for further employment. So one way to assess the value provided by PGP this year (beyond the $9,000) is about $24,000. I think that’s pretty good.

As long as I was crunching numbers, I did a little assessment of PGP’s financial health. Knowing how risky it would be, Geoff and I didn’t want to take out a loan to begin this venture. And not surprisingly, the risk incurred has been personal—to the tune of about $4,500. (I was taken aback to realize it was that much.) But we are grateful that the business is now reaching a healthier stage. Sales are picking up. Producing about 500-600 pounds per month has been, as expected, the threshold for the bottom line moving up rather than down. At present, our licenses and insurance are paid for and we’ve built up a little inventory of supplies. Even then we still have a little money in our checking account and we’re considering paying ourselves something back. Perfect timing for the holidays. While we’ve yet to take anything in terms of salary—other than eating ass-kickin' good granola nearly every day (if we don't say so ourselves, but we haven’t gotten tired of it, which seems like a good sign)—refunding ourselves will make it feel like we’re getting one.

It feels good. “Thank you for you,” our manager Evon always tells me when I drop her off after our shift. It’s a nice expression. So I want to pass it along to all of you who keep buying and eating and giving our granola and then keep coming back for more. Thanks for your encouragement, your advice, your input on everything from our labels to the size of our clusters. Thank you for you.

And keep it up. Holly Jolly Ginger is my personal favorite of all our granolas. I especially love it in muesli form. If the orders keep coming, we’ll double our shifts the next two weeks. We’re currently running a special on gift orders (see below) so this is your chance to bring other granola lovers on board. If anyone else wants to play Santa and donate a driving lesson to our manager, we would be grateful.

We do plan to take a break and leave town for the holidays, so get your orders in by the 15^th if you want them to go out before Christmas.

Two Delicious Holiday Promos....

In the spirit of Black Friday, we are offering two promotions to inspire granola gift-giving over the holidays.

Many of our fans are planning to give 3,6, or 12month gift subscriptions to our Granola-of-the-Month Club - the definition of a gift that keeps on giving, and perfect for that hard-to-buy-for friend or relative. Each month they will receive two 15oz bags of artisanal granola which, as you know, not only tastes really good, but is also helping "do good" for a community in need.

Or consider giving single bags of December's recipe: "Holly Jolly Ginger" as gifts to neighbors, co-workers, clients, etc. Stock up on 15oz bags, keep some nearby, and never again utter, "but I didn't get anything for you..." We have one fan who has said she plans on giving granola to hosts on the holiday party circuit instead of the traditional bottle of wine.

So to make it easy for you:

Promotion #1 (for people who want to stock up on individual bags): FREE SHIPPING.

This is a limited time offer: Between NOW and THIS SATURDAY (the Saturday after Thanksgiving...Saturday November 28th, 2009) we will waive the shipping charges for all orders of four or more bags. During checkout, simply check the box that says: "I have arranged for my own pickup/delivery." Orders will go out the first week of December and we'll include a card with the Providence Granola Project story on it for each bag ordered. FYI: for those of you who want to take advantage of this offer, but won't be giving gifts until later in December, our granola keeps really well in the freezer.

Promotion #2 (for people who want to give gift subscriptions): FREE GRANOLA

For every six months of gift subscriptions to the Granola-of-the-Month (GOTM) club ordered between now and December 24th, we will send you - the gift giver - a free installment of the Granola-of-the-Month (a 15oz bag of Keith's Originola, and a 15oz bag of that month's unique recipe). All you pay is shipping ($5.95 which won't be charged until after you receive the granola).

It works like this:

Order (2) Three-month gift subscriptions to GOTM and we'll extend ONE free month (except for shipping) of the GOTM club to you.

Order (4) Three-month gift subscriptions and we'll extend TWO free months to you.

Order (1) Six-month gift subscription and we'll extend ONE free month to you.

Order (2) Six-month gift subscription and we'll extend TWO free months to you.

Order (1) Twelve-month gift subscription and we'll extend TWO free months to you.

Order (4) Three-month subscription, and (2) six month subscriptions and we'll extend FOUR free months to you....

OK by now you get the picture. The more you order the longer your own FREE subscription to the GOTM club becomes. If you are already a subscriber, we can either extend your subscription or apply the offer to the months you have remaining.

A few Terms:

Orders placed by December 15th will be shipped in time for Christmas unless you specify that you'd like the subscription to start in January.

Orders placed after December 15th will automatically begin in January.

Your credit card will initially be charged for only the first month of the subscription to the GOTM club. It will be automatically charged after that on the 20th of each month for the length of the subscription.

Please feel free to email us at providencegranola@gmail.com with questions.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. There is much to be thankful for. We are especially grateful for you - our friends, fans, and partners.

Geoff and Keith

December's Recipe-of-the-Month

December's recipe of the month is “Holly Jolly Ginger.” This recipe was a crowd-pleaser last year. It comes with red sweetened cranberries, snowy coconut flakes, and little gold morsels of crystallized ginger. Very festive and great for gifts. (stay tuned for two exciting holiday promotional offers...)

Here is a quote from last years blogpost: "I’m especially pleased with the ginger. After visiting Vietnam earlier this year I went on a quest for a ginger that came close to what the street vendors there have to offer. The stuff I’ve sampled from health food stores here has a lousy texture and tastes kind of soapy. While I never did find Vietnamese ginger, I did come across these little chips of Australian baby ginger made by Ginger People, which are great in granola. They’re mildly spicy with fresh flavor and no aftertaste."
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Full list of ingredients: oats (org), spelt and/or kamut or rye flakes (org), Sucanat (org minimally processed sugar), honey, canola oil (expeller pressed), Craisins, raisins, wheat germ, oat bran (org), sunflower seeds (org), sesame seeds (org), pecans, almonds, coconut (org), coconut flakes (org) pecan meal, crystallized ginger, flax seeds, oat fiber, vanilla extract, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, almond extract.

Vote for the label you like best!

Here are a few "rough" versions of new label designs we are considering for our bags. Please post a comment letting us know which you prefer (A,B,C...etc.) and, if you don't mind, why?

Two Introductions

First of all: Our newest employee. Saw Kay, a refugee originally from Myanmar (Burma), arrived in Providence about 4 months ago along with his wife and 5 children after spending years in a camp in Thailand. Saw and his wife Sa Nay are Karen—one of the ethnic minority groups who have been persecuted for years by Burma’s military government. Aside from one other family who arrived with them, they are—if you can imagine this!—the only speakers of a language called Karen Sgaw in the state of Rhode Island. Saw does speak some Burmese and seems to understand a bit of Thai, but he and I are learning to communicate primarily through pictures and charades along with a lot of smiles and a resilience for being misunderstood. The day I hired him, I wasn’t really sure he understood that I was hiring him or whether he wanted to be hired, but sure enough he showed up at my office at 3:45 and off we went. One thing he does understand is hard work; he clearly enjoys making granola and is even learning to joke around with the rest of us. He even seems to like the granola and gladly takes a pound home for his family. To learn more about refugees from Burma, check out http://www.cal.org/resources/pubs/burmese.html

Secondly: Our newest product line, which we are calling Muesli, is a lower-cal, Swiss style breakfast version of our granola. Like many of you, Geoff and I tend to think of our granola as a snack food as much as breakfast, which is why we put so much effort into keeping it chunky. For my own breakfast, I’ve developed a technique of sifting out the “the dust” (as Geoff and I call it) from the bottom of the bag and mixing it in a bowl with a handful of dry oats. The oats cut the sweetness, lower the calories, plus I love the taste. If I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll even pre-toast a week’s supply of the oats in the oven for a about a half hour to bring out their flavor. Believe me, I always feel very Swiss when I do this—and now for an introductory sale price of 4.95 (Original)/5.95 (Recipe of the month) a pound you can too. Providence Muesli uses the same recipes as our chunky granola and is mixed at a ratio of three parts un-chunky granola per one part toasted organic oats.

Part 2 of Semi-hostile Interview with Keith Cooper

Okay. You, oh-so-eloquently mentioned “innovations and stuff.” Tell us more.

With business picking up and the gift giving season around the corner, Geoff and I have a few things up our sleeves. We’ve published some new marketing material, so if any of our fans would like to spread the word, we can send you some postcards to hand out. With the help of one of our artistically gifted fans we’re getting close to a new logo along with new packaging that will keep the granola fresher. We’re even about to release a new product called “Providence Muesli.”

Sounds artisanal. Is that really a word, anyway, or did you make it up? You realize, don’t you, that nobody knows how to pronounce it.

The muesli is a bit of an alter-ego to our signature big-chunk, tooth-cracking, snacking style granola. This stuff belongs in a bowl. The recipe’s the same, but the grade is smaller and fits nicely on a spoon. You can think of it as, perhaps, the European version. Refined. Swiss. We’re also mixing it (and lowering the calories) with some straight-up organic oats that have been toasted to bring out the...

Let me guess: the je-ne-sais-quoi quality?

And more economically priced, I might add.

So what else? Dare I ask how business is going?

On the employment side, excellent. Better than imagined. Of the 6 refugees we’ve hired so far, 5 have already moved on to other jobs. Ayenge, our new hire in September, lasted all of 3 weeks before she went out and found herself a job. I don’t want to take too much credit, but she’d been in the US for over 2 years and we were her first employer. After the first work shift she brought a translator in to see me to ask if she was fired. It was great fun to tell her she’d been amazing. By the second week, I think she realized she could do the job as well as anybody. Now she’s gone and I’m hiring someone new.

And I heard you have a manager now.

Yep. Evon, our first employee who now works at a fancy restaurant, has been cut back to weekends, so I invited her back as our manager and switched our work day to Wednesdays. She now oversees the shift and does most of the training. I drop off and pick up, but she does most of the work.

How about sales? Are you making the big bucks yet?

We think we’ve finally started breaking even, so that’s a milestone. This summer we had a successful run at a few farmer’s markets. We’re quite proud of our sample-to-purchase ratio. Also, several very, very fancy RI restaurants have been buying us through Farm Fresh Market Mobile …

"Very" as in you’re very much dying to tell me who they are.

(scowl, short pause)… I admit, we’re impressed. It seems too easy—it makes us realize that if our fans mentioned us to the breakfast places they visit, our granola-domination of Rhode Island might soon be complete. We’ve also contracted with a non-profit, The George Wiley Center, to produce “George Wiley Ginger.” Profits from their sales (mostly through church/temple fundraisers) go toward feeding the hungry. That said, we’re definitely seeing some of the flaws of our business plan.

No kidding. Such as hiring people who don’t speak any English or have any experience in the American job market? Or trying to pay semi-decent wages? Or intentionally losing your best employees? Not to mention setting up as a for-profit LLC because you want people to know that refugees are contributing rather than taking from the local economy? I mean…

If these are questions, they seem rhetorical. In fact, this whole semi-hostile interview thing is becoming so blatantly self-serving that I might as well beg you to ask me about that request for help I mentioned right at the beginning.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot. So is there anything else? Some request you’d like to make?

Come to think of it, yes. Over and over, various faithful granola fans keep asking us what they can do, how they can help—and this got me thinking. It would really help our business if our manager, Evon, could get her driver’s license. Not only would it make her more employable but it would ease the burden of me driving refugees all over town on work days.

So how can we help?

So—I’ve made some arrangements with Joan’s Driving School in Cranston to provide Evon with discounted (thank you Joan!) driving lessons. And you can buy her one. Once you’ve finished buying your bag of Maple Rosemary (which came out awesome, I might add) you can also add on an hour-long driving lesson for only $35. Our goal is to provide 12-15 hours of lessons. If more than that comes in, we’ll either refund the money or offer you the opportunity to donate it towards step two of this plan--to buy a Providence Granola Project used car for Evon to use.

There your have it. End of interview. Thanks for reading, folks. Eat your oats. Keep hostility to a minimum. If you need a great driving teacher, call Joan. (I'll be hiring her myself in about--gasp--a year.) Tune in next time to hear about our newest employee from Burma. Keep a look out for our new muesli. And thanks, as always, for your support of refugees and RI’s best granola.

Ingredients in Maple Rosemary Granola: oats (org), barley (org), Sucanat (minimally processed cane sugar), honey (native RI), canola oil (expeller pressed), prunes (hard to find and overpriced because they don’t have chemicals in them), dates (org), Craisins, raisins, sesame seeds (org), sunflower seeds, wheat germ, oat bran (org), almonds, walnuts, coconut (org), pecan meal, flax seeds (org), maple syrup (authentic and mostly organic, although I ran out halfway through and had to use some conventional), oat fiber, vanilla, sea salt, cinnamon, rosemary (org, hand-picked this week in the rain at 6 AM from my plot at the Foxpoint Community Garden), nutmeg, almond extract. Absolutely no anthrax.

Semi-hostile interview with Keith Cooper in two parts:

PART 1

So, Keith, what’s the deal? Where’ve you been? No blog entries in over a month.

Sorry. I really don’t know how bloggers do it—the constant output. I’m just not up to it. I get tired. I get distracted. Plus I’ve been very busy, you know, innovating and stuff.

Well, how are you doing it now?

The way we do everything, a novel approach. This time I’m trying an interview by a semi-hostile interviewer who can get right in my face and force the crucial information out of me, plus even a request for help—without needing to worry about basic niceties like grammatical sentences. What’s said is said. Once it’s out of my mouth, there’s no taking it back. It’s a bit ruthless, I suppose, but hopefully it will get the job done. And the real stroke of genius is being my own semi-hostile interviewer—I can do the whole thing right here in my own home on a Saturday morning without so much as a shower or brushing my teeth.

Did you even make granola in September?

Of course. September’s flavor was Salted Mango. We used unsulfured dried mango, macadamia nuts, pumpkin seeds, along with virgin olive oil which made it extra healthy and gave it an earthy flavor. I’ll put the ingredients at the end.

Salt? Healthy?

Actually we didn’t use any extra salt—just courser salt. Since the crystals don’t completely dissolve you occasionally get a miniature burst of flavor. All the month club members got a bag.

Is there any left?

Just 5 bags. If you order today you could probably get one.

And what’s up for October?

What? It’s October already? [Expletive deleted] How did that happen.

Well, as the ancient, now-dead, Romans used to say, “Tempus fugit.” You also had a birthday, which means your life is probably about…

Cool it. We agreed semi-hostile, not malicious. And yes, October’s recipe will be out next week. Despite all the unsolicited really helpful suggestions that came in from our fan-club for an appropriately frightening name, we decided to go with…

Wait. I want to hear these.

No you don’t.

What makes you think that you know what I do or don’t want to hear?

Okay, then. “Bloody Bandaid [Sic] Raisin,” “Chocolate Cat Hair Crunch,” “Cranberry Swamp Ass Surprise,” “Anthrax Apple”…

Hmm…

And those are just the nice ones.

You know that using "sic" is rude and elitist.

No it's sick. Get it?

(Moment of awkward silence.) Where were we?

I warned you. Some things just don’t belong on a granola blog. October’s recipe is Maple-Rosemary. The rosemary is subdued—very classy, plus it's home-grown, organic, straight from my community garden plot. It has dates and cranberries. In honor of Halloween, I am even adding some smashed bits of prune, which will provide a slight gross-out quality but in a very tasty way. I’ll put the ingredients in part 2 of this interview.

Yum! Yummy! Wow!

I hate those words.

I know! That’s why I’m using them.

Can we get on with this? I’d like to get a shower before noon.

Now that you mention it. This is a perfect time for a break.

To be continued

Ingredients in Salted Mango: oats (org), barley (org), honey (native RI), raw sugar, extra virgin olive oil, raisins, sesame seeds (org), pepitas, sunflower seeds (org), wheat germ, oat bran (org), walnuts, dried mango (w/sugar, unsulfured), coconut (org), flax seeds (org), millet (org), macadamias, pecan meal, oat fiber, course sea salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, almond extract.