Happy Happy! Yum Yum! We d like to introduce the Apricot Fruit Spread, officially. New just this past canning season, it s swiftly become an absolute favorite of both customers and staff alike. This slideshow requires JavaScript. Full of flavor with a bit of a bite back from the tartness, it s our most brightly flavored of all our fruit spreads and is absolutely fantastic in an enormous variety of uses. This is the go-to spread for just about every occasion you can imagine! Contents: Apricots, Sugar, Lemon Juice, Arrowroot powder. That s it! Try it on: Meats Cakes & Jelly Rolls As a topping/dressing for ice cream yogurt cottage cheese salads As a dip for other fruits and veggies tortilla chips (just add a little bit of diced jalapeno for a bit of a kick!)
There s a ton of other ideas, of course, including over pancakes or Waffles of Insane Greatness! Or, you could always just use it for the traditional PB&J. Groups: Best Practices, Part 3 With the other two parts to this series, you should be all set up with who s in your group, where the goods will be shipped, who the leader is, and be set up in the computer system at Muirhead Canning. How do you keep track of who s paid and who hasn t? How do you gently remind people that they need to make their payment so everyone gets their order at the price everyone thinks they re getting it at? There s a few solutions available, including techie ones, social networking ones, and old-fashioned paper and word of mouth methods.
Technology to the Rescue First, let s take a look at a couple phone apps. Group Expenses lets you Split, track and settle your shared bills. Group Expenses is a smart easy-to-use group expense management application which can be used at any place where a group is involved, be it a trip to Vegas, a simple dinner party or roommates trying to track down their monthly shared expenses. It eliminates all the paper work and makes life much simpler for the expense tracking guy so that he can stop worrying about the expenses and enjoy his vacation/trip/lunch etc Android iphones Social Networking Facebook provides an excellent method to keep everything in one place and have an open line of communication, no matter where everyone s at or what they re doing. Just create a group and invite the members of your Muirhead Canning Group to join up, then you can add the event, a file to keep track of who gets what, and open the conversation line for everyone in the group.
Spreadsheets You have multiple ways to do spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are your friends. 1. 2. 3. You can make a simple one by hand on a blank piece of paper and just hang it on your fridge. Print one out and fill it in by hand. Share a Google Doc, it s easy to use this template! Fill it out, share it with all your Group members and then each can update the spreadsheet as they take care of their individual piece of the shared pie. Regardless of how you choose to handle this part, be sure to keep track and let everyone in your group know just where everyone stands. That way, if there is an incident that needs to be handled before ship date, it can be taken care of discretely and respectfully so all members of your group want to do it again the following year!
Groups: Best Practices, Part 2 So, you ve had a couple of days to talk with people you know and get a group of people together. Congratulations on getting everyone together to get some great fruit made the old fashioned way! Your friends and family are really going to thank you for this opportunity; right after they try Muirhead Canning s Hood-Crest fruits! Next, talk to everyone in your Group and let them know what the end goal is. Your goal is to reach 28 cases total between all of you. This will get your Group both free shipping *and* a 10% discount. You and your Group can decide how many cases each will or can be responsible for. It can be done many ways, of course. Five members of the Group could each be responsible for 5 cases with three members volunteering to get an additional case. One person could get 10 cases, another person might sign up for 8, leaving the final three members each to purchase just 3 1/3 cases. One might choose to order 14 cases, another 7, a third 4, and the final two splitting the difference.
How you choose to split the order up is, of course, your choice! After you figure out how you ll order and who s responsible for what, let each member of your Group know that the fruit will be delivered to you, the Group Contact, to get the special discounts and free shipping. Once you get the entire order, you ll need to contact everyone and have them come get their order from you (or you can deliver yourself, at your discretion!). Next, give us a call at the office to set the Group Order up. We ll set it up with the Group Contact s name and shipping information, as we ll be shipping the whole order to you, the Group Contact. Then, collect everyone s order and ensure you ve met the 28 case minimum order for those discounts and instruct each person to send their checks, with your Group Contact s name in the memo section, to: Muirhead Canning 5267 Mill Creek Rd The Dalles, OR 97058 Or, to use a credit card, just have them give us a jingle! 541-298-1660. Be sure to let them know that they ll need to have the office staff bring up the order under the Group Contact s name, else the payment won t get applied to the right order.
Now, each time we get a payment applied to your Group Order, you should get either an email with payment received or a regular USPS letter from us indicating that a payment has been made, depending on how you set the account up to begin with. Be sure to contact our offices before the delivery date, though, to ensure that you re not stuck with an outstanding balance due that you ve got to collect from someone who had good intentions but either forgot or ran into a bit of a bind! Not many people like those kinds of surprises, especially around the holidays. Now everyone gets to enjoy their fruit, their discounts, free shipping, and they get to eat it all, too! Groups: Best Practices, Part
1 There are several ways to save some money on large orders. The trick is, it s pretty unlikely that one family (unless it s an enormous family) can eat enough fruit inside of the Best by date to make it worthwhile. Many people create Groups and order together to get their single orders large enough to get both free shipping and the discount we offer. There s always the risk of someone finding themselves in an unfortunate position of not being able to purchase their order, but if you follow these guidelines, you should all be okay in the end! First off, be sure to decide on a single person who will be in contact with our offices. This is what makes a Group a Group; a single person represents the whole and that single person gets to talk to everyone else in the group. Otherwise, it s just a bunch of individuals placing orders. Make sense? So, contact your family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors to see if you can get your Group arranged.
Next post, we ll discuss the goals of your group and how to get things arranged to create your group with us! New for 2014! This year, we re rolling out four new flavors of Fruit Spread, all berries!
Blackberry Blueberry Strawberry Rhubarb Raspberry You probably already guessed those flavors from the pictures of the berries all over everywhere, but we were so excited about them that we jumped the gun just a tad when doing the new site. The blueberry is one of the most requested flavors since we began making Fruit Spreads and Russell has outdone himself making it close to the consistency of a Blueberry Compote. We ll post photos of them soon, but Jayme s going to work on some new label designs for them first! Watch the blog, because this is where she ll post the concepts. You ll get to add comments and let her know which you prefer