Back to business
Inflation here in the Philippines is cramping my business style. But I’m going to do business anyway. So there.
First off, getting the quality of meat my bacon-wrapped meatloaves and meatloaf balls with cheese are known for is difficult, and finding a steady supply of said meat is even more so. Meat prices are also unstable, with the costs rising nearly every darned week. Let’s not even discuss how much carrots cost, please, for the love of everything tasty.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the inflation rate stood at 7.7% as of Nov. 4. Whether or not the President of the Republic agrees with the inflation rate, it is what it is and will keep wreaking havoc on budgets across our archipelago. Unless government actually gets its act together and fixes that shit, I have no way of offering my parokyanos their favorite bacon-wrapped meaty goodness at a reasonable price that will remain reasonable for at least several months.
That inflation rate means I’m not going to be producing any products that require ground beef or carrots for the meantime. The price points I will have to put on the final product are much too high for my chosen market. That, and the ground beef available from most of my usual suppliers looks suspiciously paler than usual, which usually means there is more fat added to the grind than I’d like, so there will be more shinkage of the final output. This may be because imported ground beef from New Zealand has been scarce — heck ground meat from anywhere is scarce, and too darned expensive.
Plus my oven needs repairs, and so does my food processor. Getting those fixed is going to cost me a pretty penny. I buy the best kitchen equipment my money can buy — and this means that repairs and maintenance for them does not come cheap, so I need to put some profits aside for that. We’re focusing on menu items that do not require the use of either gadget until we can get those thingamajigabobs up and running at optimum levels again. This means no beef and beans or pork and beans, because I roast the meat I use for those bean stews in the oven to render the excess (and deadly) fat out and lock in flavor before I add the meat to the beans.
Having said that, I’ve taken my family’s Happy Kitchen in a new direction: We’re bottling and selling the spice mix we use for those meatloaves and meatloaf balls our clientele love so much.
If I can’t give them the full bacon-wrapped meatloaf with Gouda cheese experience, I can still sell them the spice mix that makes that experience unique. I’ll even give them the recipe for free.
These 120ml bottles my daughters and I packed with our secret spice mix are for sale at PHP200 per bottle, and, to keep quality at optimum levels, I make that in small batches of 30, pack the tasty dust in tight as I can to minimize oxidation, and seal the screwcaps on as securely as I can.
The spice is perfect for beef and pork, great with chicken, and excellent with seafood and vegetable dishes. I also like to add it to soups, stews, my homemade corned beef (which I will not sell. Sorry, friends), and in gravies and sauces. This is a salt-free, pepper-free spice mix, so the cooks who use it can control the amount of salt and pepper they put into their kitchen masterpieces. It can be used as a dry rub or added to a wet marinade, and a little goes a long way: I use one tablespoon of this for each kilogram of my meatloaf mix, along with a wet marinade, salt, and eggs.
Added to the spice mix, I’ve been making very small batches of strawberry jam the way my family likes it: Thick, gooey, and slightly tart.
This jam comes in 370ml bottles and costs PHP480 per bottle. I puree frozen strawberries with kalamansi (also called calamondin) juice and brown sugar, add some water, then cook the slurry down until it is thick, and a deep, vibrant red.
My daughters and I are very happy to offer those who patronize this little business that can the best our kusina has to offer, even if we have to do this in small batches (they have day jobs, and I have editing and writing gigs). We deliver to the customers, either by using a courier service, or by personally hand-carrying the goods to those customers who live near our home.
Payments can be made via online payment, bank transfer, or cash on delivery. We are flexible like that and, at the core of this little buisness, we embrace the value of providing responsive and personalized service to our little circle of loyal customers. This was how my parents did business, and it is an old-fashioned business practice that should never, ever go out of style.
Our Happy Kitchen is all about making people happy. We must have done that well enough that, now that we’ve restarted the business, our spice mix sold out within 24 hours of our announcement to market that we have it up for sale. The jam is going even faster: Our first order came in 10 minutes after I posted photos of the finished product on my Facebook profile. An hour or two later, half of the batch of 12 bottles of jam got snapped up — and the jam hadn’t fully cooled yet.
My daughters and I are back at the drawing board for what other bottled goodies we can sell. Product development and marketing strategy are important to the kind of business we do.
I’m probably going to be selling fishy love — also known as gourmet dulong (fish fry) and gourmet daing (salted dried labahita fish) that I saute in plenty of garlic, leeks, lemon juice, lemon zest and butter, and pack into glass bottles. These are lovely with hot rice, on toast or crackers, or added to omelets or scrambled eggs.
My Twin Towers make wonderful lemon curd. And cranberry curd. And kalamansi curd. They are working on how they can make and bottle that for our parokyanos, as well as reworking their recipes for those curds so they can provide reduced-sugar versions of these treats using isomalt for the customers who need to watch their sugar intake.
We are also reverse-engineering my mother’s Remy Food Products tocino and longanisa, but that will take time to perfect, seeing as we are working without any hard-copy recipes from the 1980s because whatever copies of those recipes there may have been have disappeared into the mists of time, and the damp of our bodega, which needs waterproofing. If and when we do get the recipes for both iconic Remy Food Products menu items perfected, we will reintroduce those into the market, we promise.
I am ordering bottles, spice powders, and delivery bags from some trusted suppliers and preparing for the next production day. Bathala willing, I will have more to sell and profits to roll back into capital. My mother was able to build a house with her food business, then build a garments business after that. I hope she’s looking down from heaven and smiling at her youngest child making a determined attempt to follow in her footsteps. Here’s looking at you, Ma.
