Winter had been extremely mild up until this week, when we saw some big snow in the Northwest and have been more or less closed for business the last couple of days. We’re settling in nicely to the winter routine: weekend farmers markets, wholesale routes on Mondays and Fridays, and little projects/taking a breather in the middle of the week.
Speaking of little projects, we’ve been making some great batches of pickled salmon in the warehouse and selling it both at the farmers markets and to stores.
Amy and I made the trip down to Portland to do some demo’s at the New Seasons Markets the week after Christmas. We were sampling smoked keta, keta lox and pickled salmon. We spent 4 hours each day at their two newest stores: Fisher’s Landing and Progress Ridge. We really love the New Seasons Markets! Not only do they walk the talk in terms of working directly with small producers like ourselves, their stores are distinct in their extremely helpful brand of customer service. All in all, a great reason to get away to Portland for a couple days.
Our spring is projecting to be fairly quiet and mellow. In terms of our inventory, we are going to be running out of some products far before the boats leave for Alaska next June. We are going to do our best to keep the farmers markets stocked, while still keeping product on the shelves at our wholesale accounts for as long as we can. Every year is a little bit different, and it’s always a challenge trying to project our inventory over a number of months, since we put up almost all of our product for the year in a 10-12 week season. The longer we do it the less stressful it is though, generally speaking!
