Posts Tagged ‘Food’

FSB Magazine:

Squeezed between Moe’s Coffee Shop and the Shop N Go minimart on hardscrabble Frankford Avenue, in the heart of working-class Northeast Philadelphia, lies the Philly Pretzel Factory. With its algae-green sign bolted to the building’s khaki stucco exterior, it looks more like a takeout joint than the headquarters of a $40 million empire. The truth is, it’s both.

At eight o’clock on a brisk Friday morning, neighborhood folks — in all shades and shapes, from two burly guys in courier uniforms to a bottle blonde impatiently jingling her keys — stand eight deep inside the Factory. The crowd is starting to spill out of the building, while customers near the counter watch like kids peering into the oven window, urging on a batch of Christmas cookies.

Once the pride of a few family bakeries in gritty South Philadelphia, soft pretzels have always been big business in the city. But over the past decade, with four pretzel companies supporting more than 160 freestanding retail stores that tempt the taste buds and test the waistlines of locals addicted to the doughy treats, the Philly area market has become saturated, and the Big Four are hoping to turn their soft pretzels from a regional obsession into a national one.

Each of the Big Four dismisses the others’ product and plans for growth, but they all believe that giant vendors like J&J Snack Foods (JJSF) — maker of the ubiquitous SuperPretzel — and Auntie Anne’s have bamboozled the pretzel-eating public into accepting inferior pretzels.

“Philadelphians know the difference between a good pretzel and a horrible pretzel,” says Vince Marinelli, a former electrician who heads A Taste of Philly, which operates 18 stand-alone pretzel stores, mainly in the Philly burbs. “Outside this area they don’t know the difference. So there’s some work to be done educating people.”

Continue Reading: “Pretzel Wars”

Photo by sun-sentinel.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Are you a personal chef, or an entrepreneur developing recipes? Do you want to bottle/develop a recipe?

If you want to start a food business in the state of Florida (or in most other states), you’ll need a commercial kitchen. State and local laws require that all food prepared for sale to the public must be prepared or produced at a commercially licensed kitchen. Unfortunately, the cost of setting up a licensed commercial kitchen is a huge obstacle to many food entrepreneurs. This is an expense that most folks are not prepared for or do not have the knowledge of designing a kitchen which will pass inspection.

Your Pro Kitchen offers a professionally-equipped, commercially licensed multi-station kitchen facility for professional cooking and baking. In addition, they are flexible enough to support many different uses, such as cooking classes, private events, and the production or bottling of your products.

Your Pro Kitchen also offers a traditional business center with desk space, internet access, a fax machine, copy machines, a telephones.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Valerie Everett

Slate:

A hot dog vendor was kicked from the curb outside New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last week for failure to pay his monthly rent—of $53,558. Pasang Sherpa was under contract to pay the Parks Department $362,201 a year for a stand on the south side of the Met’s entrance and $280,500 for another on the north side. That’s a lot of hot dogs. With rent astronomically high, how much do New York City hot dog vendors actually make?

From Business Opportunities Weblog.