The Hope of Getting Big

I was getting a little bit frustrated at the kitchen. Pieces of equipment seemed to be disappearing and reappearing, and my eggs and other ingredients often went missing. So we put an ad on Craig’s List that we were looking for a new kitchen space. This guy from a bagel company called us and said he’s looking for somebody to share his kitchen with. We told him we were making tartlets and he said he might be able to sell them to a few of his clients. At that time, he was starting to do a little distribution on the side so he could make his deliveries worthwhile. His kitchen space wasn’t that great and we’d have to buy our own equipment so we decided to stay where we were. He almost tried to say that he wasn’t going to distribute our products unless we shared his kitchen, but we held strong and told him we really didn’t need him to sell our products. We sent him an aweful lot of samples, but he was finally able to sell our tarts to a few of his clients. It was sort of a pain because he would fax us the order by the afternoon, and we had less than 24 hours to fulfill it. So we had to be really organized with our stock, otherwise, I’d have to head down to the kitchen for an emergency bake which sucked. Eventually, most of his clients went on a standing order, but it still wasn’t enough to write home about. He handled our products very poorly, we heard horror stories from the grocery stores that he would just throw our packaged tart clamshells in a big grocery cart so they’d be all broken. Eventually, his clients dropped him, and we walked away. Of course he didn’t pay his final invoice, but he was so creepy, we almost didn’t care, but sent a collection agency after him anyway who failed to collect.