We have been in production for 4 months now. I must say, there have been definite ups and downs. We started off thinking the "ups" were the norm, which made the "downs" all the more shocking. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start with actually going live with production. This happened at the very end of October, when we made bars and put them into inventory. Everything seemed very smooth and so when Devra First, food writer for The Boston Globe, came to do a story to be published on November 13, 2019, we decided to make that the day to begin selling our bars. At that time, this email group had around 800 subscribers. We made sure our website was set up to take orders and ship them, and I wanted to be sure that all 800 subscribers would be able to place an order. Therefore I set the inventory in the website application at 800. Duh! It seems ridiculous now when I think about it. This was 800 boxes of 24 Sky Bars, or 19,200 bars. We had nowhere near that number in inventory. It shows how ignorant we were about production, logistics and customer service. Half an hour after the Globe article came out, 700 of those boxes had been ordered AND PAID FOR!! We scrambled to make bars and ship them, but we also ran into production problems which resulted in at least 50% of the bars in every run breaking and having to be thrown away. We were moving as fast as we could and almost standing still. We worked 12-18 hours every day, including Thanksgiving, but we could not keep up. After 10 days, I shut down the online ordering. The week of our grand opening we grimly joked that we might have one bar available and we should auction it off. On the actual day, we limited purchases to 6 bars per customer, but at least we had enough bars for everyone! That was the result of a good run we had about two days earlier.
What a roller coaster ride!
Since then, we have had so many challenges with so many parts and pieces of equipment: you name it, I could tell you a story about it. Believe it or not, in most instances the smallest component often caused a complete shut down. February was our worst month, when our water cooling system failed and we could not control the temperature of the chocolate. It's a tiny little add-on machine, but it took a week to fix it. We have been selling out of all of our bars every week, so for the first time, we actually had a couple of days with no bars at all to sell! We have reintroduced limited online ordering, always adjusting the inventory to amounts we can handle. We have also been having really good runs, with breakage rates down from 50% to around 10%. We have learned so much (baptism by fire) about both the production process and our equipment. The exhausting part is that, with a bad run, you often don't find out until you try to get the bars out of the molds. So not only do you spend all that time setting up, doing the run and demolding the bars: broken bars won't come out of the molds, which means that all those molds require an intense clean up. The storage tanks and molding line still need to be completely cleaned out, centers need to be made again. All for very little gain.
Our
goal is to obtain a wholesale license this year and get Sky Bars out into other stores so that you can all buy them conveniently. The first two and a half months of 2020 have been so challenging that we have not been able to turn our attention to the wholesale application process. Here's hoping the current "up" cycle becomes the new normal and that we can begin planning for wholesale! However, based on recent experience, there could be all kinds of new problems that we need to deal with, about which we are currently blissfully ignorant!
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This is Joseph Cangemi, inventor of Sky Bar. He worked at Necco. His granddaughter sent me this photo and also one below of the Necco workers. I think this is outside the South Boston location, before they moved to Cambridge. There is still a street called Necco Way. I plan on visiting it soon. Apparently one of the brick walls still has "Necco" painted on it. |
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Joseph Cangemi is second from right and his father is second from left.
The Boston Globe below from March 24, 1938 was found lining a trunk at a yard sale. It's in very good condition. Note the ad for Sky Bar at the bottom of the front page, and the more extensive one on page two. The paper makes for very interesting reading. What an awful time that was!
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And this lady remembers lying on her back on the grass watching the sky writing campaign that launched Sky Bar in 1938. Beautiful lady, you don't look nearly old enough!!
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Skybokx109 319 Speen St, Natick (508)903-1600
First restaurant to offer Sky Bar desserts! This is a delicious cheese cake |
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Sky Bar Parfait is very yummy!
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PLEASE stay safe, practice social distancing, stay home. The Sky Bar retail store is temporarily closed but if you would like to buy something email us at [email protected] and we can ship or do curb side pickup. We are still making bars, so you can buy them online at www.skybarcandy.com or at Duck Soup, which is open. All the best to you and yours. Hopefully things will have improved by the time of the next newsletter.
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