Kickstarter

First of all, as always, we want to thank you guys for believing in this project.  It's important to us that you know: your support has not gone unappreciated, and we haven't been resting on our laurels.  Even though our laurels are so comfortable. And you know how tired we get.

As we reported, our plans for moving into a commercial kitchen space have been changing as we go through this  process and learn the steps we need to take to get where we want to be.  Our original plan, to move into a communal kitchen incubator program in Harlem, turned out to be a little overly ambitious.  We were rejected from the program and given some advice on how to grow and position ourselves to reapply: get some hard market data and create a few, small scale relationships with clients who continually order our product. Thankfully, our friends at Bedford Hill Coffee Bar tried our kraut.  We've been working with them ever since they first served a bratwurst featuring our Backwoods Smokraut, hammering out the details on installing a second prep kitchen in the restaurant for us to move into. This is the spot where we'll be making our first full batch of commercially certified kraut, and we're looking forward to using the opportunity afforded us by this project to figure out our exact costs of doing business, and thus be able to accurately create financial projections and move toward a marketing plan based on those real numbers. Not for nothing, we also couldn't be happier that every day we're moving closer to fufilling the rewards for you all.

Right now, though, our future space is undergoing the needed renovations to bring it up to code.  That means the walls need to be tiled, a proper workspace needs to be installed, and hookup must be provided for a commercial sink.  That said, we're hoping to move in by mid-July.  At the same time, we're hitting a bump in the road that we honestly should have been expecting: our farmer is out of last harvest's cabbage and the new batch won't be ready until around that same time.  It's kind of a patch-22. Ahem.

Rest assured, while this process is certainly taking longer than any of us expected, we're also working on the other aspects of our rewards while we wade slowly into the waters of business. We'll be sending a follow up e-mail shortly asking our backers that signed up for our pickling class to pick a date, and another for those who picked it to choose which of our Brine & Dine dinner dates you'd prefer to pick up from us. And just this afternoon, we finished making the screens necessary to hand print all of our postcards and t-shirts!

Bill, Christopher, and David
Brine & Dine