Here and there

For fifteen years Starbucks has bought their muffins from Murdoch's Muffins in Richmond to service their 282 stores in B.C. and across the country. A couple of dozen a day per store or 1.3 million a year. Now the company has given the contract to a Toronto baker.

When we asked about the change, the company issued a statement that they were trying to consolidate their bakery business. Now the cakes will be shipped across the land in refrigerated trucks. Somebody made a new deal wouldn’t you say?

We will soon have our twenty-fifth Starbucks in the Interior with a new one across the street from Kelowna International Airport in the new Business Centre. Of course it will be a drive thru.

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In Oliver there is a most unique manufacturing operation, Okanagan Barrel
Works, Canada’s only commercial cooperage. The company has been selling barrels since 1998 and been coopering them since 2004.

Currently the company has been working on an order of 600 oak wine barrels for a California client. The oak for the barrels was sourced from the Appalachians in Pennsylvania. This was a right turn in the wine industry for the company because for so many years the wine barrels being used in the industry were made by California cooperages selling the barrels they produced into Canada.

Eric Fourthon is the master cooper in the plant. He came from Bordeaux and has a staff of five.

I didn’t realize how large the oak tanks were which the company could also produce: up to 20,000 litres.

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The bar code system is thirty-five years old, and yet it seems like we have had the bar code on the goods we buy forever. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Product Code, or UPC as we all call it today. That little bar code carries so much information and is recognized as being one of the great breakthroughs in technologies. It was a major cost saving for the grocery business and now even foods like fresh fruit carry a bar code to the cash register.

What’s next? How about radio frequency tags, which don’t require direct scanning - what would that do to our time in the grocery store? It would mean no more checkout lines. You push the cart to the sensor station which immediately takes inventory of your purchases, you enter your credit card, pay the bills, pack your groceries and go to the car.

Now, as they will, grocers will find other things for this system to do and it will gather information once again for the store. In other words, they will still know you eat KD and like finding the bargains when you shop. But the store computers can also use it to upsell you by suggesting items you should buy with this particular grocery order or give you a new recipe to try.

With all the information the store points cards have already captured (your buying habits, who you are and where you live, etc.) this new system will collect further data on you for their future planning.

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The cities in B.C. with facilities that can be used for training for the 2010 Winter Olympics have already made arrangements: cross-country and biathlon teams from France, Sweden, China, Croatia and New Zealand are already booked into Mount Washington Silver Star will be welcoming cross-country teams from Russia, Norway and Finland the men’s and women’s alpine ski teams from Austria will be at Sun Peaks in Kamloops China’s short-track speed skaters have already trained in Kamloops, and Russian skaters in all categories are going to train in Abbottsford.

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Other companies try to fake Worcestershire sauce but when you have the real stuff from Lea & Perrins you know it. I am one of those cooks who likes to use the sauce in just about everything when I am cooking. It dates back to the 1850s, and we probably don’t want to know what went into that first batch. It was, as it is today, packed in glass bottles and because of the rough sea voyages some of the bottles broke. That is when the company invented the paper wrap to protect the bottles. The wrap is not really needed anymore.

Lea and Perrin’s is about to introduce a new product to the marketplace, a thick new sauce with bold new flavour. It is Classic Worcestershire sauce and I can’t wait to try it.

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Don’t those four new salads from McDonald’s look good? The dressing with the salads is Renee’s Gourmet, and there are seven dressings you can choose from. It is the same salad dressing you find in your supermarket produce section or in specialty stores.