Working out some kinks

Remembering back, it was a few weeks in after we started selling the tarts that the sales dropped off quite a bit. We still weren’t making all that much, but we decided to switch things up and try something else. For one thing, the chocolate espresso pear had quickly fallen out of favor. I don’t think really anybody wanted to order it, so we quickly replaced it with a simple almond pear which was thankfully an easy switch. The other thing that started to become apparent was the size of the tarts made them not quite right for the espresso crowd. It is weird in a way because most chocolate chip cookies you can get are so huge that you could easily have one for an entire meal. However, a chocolate chip cookie was half the price of one of our tarts retail so since Americans prefer value over quality people would pick the cookie. Espresso drinks are already expensive enough to begin with, sometimes almost 5 bucks, so to pay another $3.50 for a tart would put the bill total around $8 bucks, which starts to seem like $10, which seems like an awful lot to pay for a cup of coffee.

So I made a few mini tarts and brought them home. We weighed them and had figured out they were about 1/3 the weight of the larger ones, so we settled on $.50/ea and would sell them by the dozen. We didn’t want our retailers to have to sell the tarts for over $1.00 so we priced it based on what we thought the market would bear. In retrospect, that was obviously a bad choice because the labor was going to kill us. We had not costed out our recipes, we had some general idea, but nothing exact. We had also based our markup on about triple the ingredient costs, which we’d learn was not enough of a markup. Because the recipes were so multi-faceted with various prep items and steps to produce, we didn’t exactly know how long they took to make.

However, we did figure out is that it was ok to freeze the tarts. That saved us tons of time, and I was beginning to work out a production schedule in my mind. We were still focused on only baking about 1 week at a time, and since our orders were not that huge, it was a lot of work for very little return, especially since we had just shot ourselves in the foot by making our products (and therefore our price/unit) smaller.