Sometimes the tail wags the dog—so much that it hurts the dog.
Since we began our business more than thirty years ago, our primary product has been almond brittle, and it will continue to be so in the future.
But making brittle the way we think best creates lots of left over material--fine bits of raw almonds from breaking up whole nuts to a better size for roasting, and pieces of brittle too small to bag after we have selected out the best sizes for the 5oz and 1lb bags. Fortunately, we’ve been able to find uses for this remainder material--packaging it directly as almond flour or brittle topping or using it to create new products like Sweet Hots, almond butter or biscotti. For a long while the demand for these secondary products about matched the supply of the left over material, and the dog was happy.
But now the demand for these secondary products, particularly Sweet Hots, has grown so large that using just the remainder material is not nearly sufficient. We are now making hundreds of additional batches of brittle just to run them through a mill and sifting screens to get the right sized pieces for the Sweet Hots. All these extra steps increase the labor costs substantially—and the tail is now wagging the very unhappy dog.
In a similar vein, making Brittle Corn takes significantly more labor than just making brittle even though the ingredients cost per bag is less. So, our solution is to raise the prices of these more labor intensive products to better reflect the true cost of making them. Starting July 1, were leaving the price of our almond brittle unchanged, but raising the prices of our Sweet Hots and Brittle Corn. We hope you’ll understand.