Joy in the kitchen (store) • no. 63
We've doubled. Classes are great. Hours are expanded. Grocery product SKU is advancing
You are reading 3Bits & Change, Joseph's email about building a direct to consumer business on the internet. Today’s email was written to a bad station Alexa chose, again.
Good morning! Happy Wednesday!
Doubling
We’ve doubled the team!
Sterling joined Vivront from a solid bartender gig with fierce latte art skills. Before joining he worked for a number of years in various rolls at an online university and is from the west coast. And now… he’s taking a ton of joy in cleaning kitchen knives better than I do. :) Oh, he sharpens real well too!
We’re excited to have Sterling join the team. He starting sharpening training on a hot summer day last June. He continued to stop into the shop in the fall and pestered me for a gig each time. We’ve become eager to add his skills to the effort.
Welcome Sterling!
He’ll be taking lead on the shop in Wayzata as a Knife Specialist. He’ll check in knives, smile, sharpen, talk about kitchen goodies and Japanese kitchen knives too. And help folks purchase kitchen tools that delight. Fun fun!
On Fridays and Saturdays we’ve been tag teaming our knife skills classes where happiness abounds. Class skills class availability here.
Hours have expanded at the Wayzata store to accommodate shoppers.
New store hours are:
Tuesday-Thursday 11-6
Friday-Saturday 11-3 • Classes 3-4:30
Folks have been delighted with our work over the last week. Here are a few from the Google machine.
Product advisory board
We’ve formed a product advisory board and are inviting grocery industry folks to join and help us design the next retail product and point of purchase. Let me know who you know in grocery.
Sum
The weather is warming, the ice is melting and folks are coming back out to sharpen, take classes and purchase knives. We’ve doubled the team and advanced the grocery effort more in the last week.
Change
Some school districts are serving more finger foods because they can’t always buy plastic utensils. One is using a federal voucher to subsidize the cheese on its pizzas. Another is agonizing over whether to cut staff to offset its grocery bills. NBC NEWS
The MN Senate voted yesterday and passed a bill to offer universal free school lunch to students in MN. The house has a chance to revise and then the Governor is expected to sign. Fantastic! We’ll remain committed to bettering school lunch, period. In other states we’ll continue to pay down debts and in MN we’re looking for partners on how to go beyond simply paying down debts.
While MN will join ME and CA with universal free lunch for the next two years by covering the spread between the Federal reimbursement and actual costs, much of the rest of the country’s school lunch programs are being squeezed by raising costs.
Funding efforts continue at the federal level. Current increased rates are scheduled to expire in July. This house bill is to extend current increases in reimbursement. This one is to permanently increase the federal reimbursement rates.
On Your Way
Happy spring all! I can feel it in the air. There is still time to ski. There is also time to sharpen before Easter. It’s just a few weeks out at this point. Let us know if we can help!
Cheers!
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Order kitchen knives sharpened or give the gift of sharp at Vivront.com.