spatulas, attached at twelve-inch intervals, moving periodically, and in unison, to flip the toasts so the other side could brown. When I asked about these spatulas, I was told they were indeed bought in a local hardware store—ingenious and highly effective! They also found a way to waste an unseemly amount of packaging by ripping open and discarding the outer boxes after they deemed any products underweight or otherwise imperfect. In this case, I kept silent.
The last vivid recollection I have of that memorable plant tour was when I inquired as to their most effective quality control systems. Taste testing is a vital step for any size food manufacturing business, and great fun. But Quaker told me that primarily they eat a pizza every day ! Of course, obviously, they perform the many additional quality and safety checks and parameters dictated by good manufacturing practices, but taste testing is way up there for all of us.
Quaker Oats never did add quiche to their line, but that visit was another great chapter of my “on the job” training in the vast foodservice industry that my accidental business landed me in and that I truly love.
Reality Sets in
I was always working. It was relentless. My business had taken over my life, and fighting it would just have made things that much harder. But at least when I finally dragged myself home at night, Bridget had dinner ready (one of her creations, much to my chagrin, was lamb chop soup!). In later years, after Love and Quiches was well established and until she retired, she was the Love and Quiches doyenne, a matriarchal symbol who came to the office with me once or twice a week for many years, claiming she was bored at home, to stamp out shells.
Bridget was a very interesting character. Every year she took a trip with her church group—big-time trips. Years later, when Irwin and I were finally able to travel, there was hardly a place we visited that shehadn’t been to before us! China, Israel, South America, and lots of cruises where she brought back photos of herself at the captain’s table dressed in an evening gown, complete with elbow-length gloves.
My work-dominated life and the crazy events that came with it was the new reality, and I accepted it. On one occasion, Irwin and I were in the city to enjoy a rare evening out on the town when I made the mistake of calling the plant from the restaurant to see how everything was going. I was told that the roof had fallen in. Thinking this was a manner of speaking, I immediately became upset, thinking of every imaginable catastrophe that they might be referring to. But as it turned out, the roof of our eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot freezer had actually collapsed ! Something wonderful also happened, however: my employees had taken charge, calling in the necessary parties, and by the time Irwin and I got back, the repairs were already well under way. Everything was under control without me! Without realizing it at the time, this was an important milestone, part of the process of learning to let go … to trust.
Trying to separate your personal and business lives simply doesn’t work—not at this level, not until you have developed an effective organization with clearly defined areas of responsibility. We were nowhere near that point yet. I was exhausted all the time, still finding compelling reasons to spend time on my hands and knees in the plant scrubbing something that I felt needed scrubbing, responsible for everybody, worrying about everything, but knowing deep inside that I was going to see it through and move on to the next level. Too much momentum had already been created; there could be no turning back.
The 36,000 Pies
We continued in our efforts to expand up and down the East Coast, with me serving as sole out-of-town salesperson, and I can report that it is really cold in Buffalo in the dead of winter. I was dancing as fast as I could, and little by little, we picked up even more small distributorsfrom New
The last vivid recollection I have of that memorable plant tour was when I inquired as to their most effective quality control systems. Taste testing is a vital step for any size food manufacturing business, and great fun. But Quaker told me that primarily they eat a pizza every day ! Of course, obviously, they perform the many additional quality and safety checks and parameters dictated by good manufacturing practices, but taste testing is way up there for all of us.
Quaker Oats never did add quiche to their line, but that visit was another great chapter of my “on the job” training in the vast foodservice industry that my accidental business landed me in and that I truly love.
Reality Sets in
I was always working. It was relentless. My business had taken over my life, and fighting it would just have made things that much harder. But at least when I finally dragged myself home at night, Bridget had dinner ready (one of her creations, much to my chagrin, was lamb chop soup!). In later years, after Love and Quiches was well established and until she retired, she was the Love and Quiches doyenne, a matriarchal symbol who came to the office with me once or twice a week for many years, claiming she was bored at home, to stamp out shells.
Bridget was a very interesting character. Every year she took a trip with her church group—big-time trips. Years later, when Irwin and I were finally able to travel, there was hardly a place we visited that shehadn’t been to before us! China, Israel, South America, and lots of cruises where she brought back photos of herself at the captain’s table dressed in an evening gown, complete with elbow-length gloves.
My work-dominated life and the crazy events that came with it was the new reality, and I accepted it. On one occasion, Irwin and I were in the city to enjoy a rare evening out on the town when I made the mistake of calling the plant from the restaurant to see how everything was going. I was told that the roof had fallen in. Thinking this was a manner of speaking, I immediately became upset, thinking of every imaginable catastrophe that they might be referring to. But as it turned out, the roof of our eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot freezer had actually collapsed ! Something wonderful also happened, however: my employees had taken charge, calling in the necessary parties, and by the time Irwin and I got back, the repairs were already well under way. Everything was under control without me! Without realizing it at the time, this was an important milestone, part of the process of learning to let go … to trust.
Trying to separate your personal and business lives simply doesn’t work—not at this level, not until you have developed an effective organization with clearly defined areas of responsibility. We were nowhere near that point yet. I was exhausted all the time, still finding compelling reasons to spend time on my hands and knees in the plant scrubbing something that I felt needed scrubbing, responsible for everybody, worrying about everything, but knowing deep inside that I was going to see it through and move on to the next level. Too much momentum had already been created; there could be no turning back.
The 36,000 Pies
We continued in our efforts to expand up and down the East Coast, with me serving as sole out-of-town salesperson, and I can report that it is really cold in Buffalo in the dead of winter. I was dancing as fast as I could, and little by little, we picked up even more small distributorsfrom New
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