Interviewer: Just tell me… I guess let’s start off with what you were using before, and if anything and you know, what were the challenges of that and were you able to sort of overcome those challenges by transitioning to one of our systems?
Response: Yeah, well, in purchasing the Emplex 7503, it completely changed our business. We were using a tabletop sealer and we had two of them and they broke quite frequently and we had to change the little, the little numbers using the tweezers and everything every single day. And my employees were really frustrated by that because it had a very manual way that you had to change the date. And, we, we had just been growing very quickly and we couldn’t, we didn’t have enough throughput in the manual machines. So we started looking at options and I met Richard and he’s a wealth of knowledge and really helped me through the decision. And it was a bit more than we wanted to spend at the time, but we were able to get a lease on it. And we’ve since been, we’ve been growing like crazy. We almost need another one now.
Interviewer: Yeah that does happen, that does happen a lot… So you’re, you’re old machines were breaking down like almost every day?
Response: No, they weren’t breaking down every day, but we had to change the date every day. They have this little mechanical, or not mechanical like little manual…
Interviewer: …Was it like an embosser?
Response: Embosser, yes. And we had to use tweezers and change out the various dates and it was just very tedious.
Interviewer: So was there a reason you chose like the vacuum and gas flush? Like I know obviously it’s very helpful for an application like you guys with granola and shelf life and that, but one of the things we’ve been hearing a lot now is, there are a lot of retailers like Walmart and whole foods, which won’t accept packages, for very long on their shelves without doing something like a modified atmosphere package. At least that’s true of coffee. So I was wondering if for you guys you had sort of similar concerns and needs that way, which made you decide to do like a modified atmosphere.
Response: We didn’t have any retailer’s asking. We’re just very particular about our product and the freshness of our product and we want everyone who buys our product to have a great experience. And we also, we had a nice shelf life already because of the way we processed our product. We use dehydrators and pull all the moisture out, but we also wanted to pull the oxygen out of the package and replace it with nitrogen to even extend our shelf life further. We’ve been able to get over a year shelf life now, which will open up International markets for us as well.
Interviewer: Is there, is there like a particular market you’re looking at internationally in general?
Response: Canada is interesting to us, yeah.
Interviewer: I mean whole foods is, is really blowing up their granola. I feel like the health… cause I’m sure you get this in California… like the sort of health and fitness type foods are really blowing up. So that totally makes sense to me. Like you would look at Canada that way. So those, those were really just some of the general questions. Like anything else, like you can think of about the machine
Response: Well I can just say that we love the machine it’s very easy to use and it has allowed us to grow, and we’re still learning the capabilities of the machine, and some of the variations of how to use it, but it’s just been one of my best experiences buying it. And we’ve had great support from Richard.