03-22-06 - Ready or not. Here we come!!!

See us at Expo West in Anaheim on March 24 to 26 where YummyEarth will officially be born!!!

Taste YummyEarth for the first time at booth #3986, which is specialty food broker Market Connections Group's booth.

Lollipops will be free and plentiful!!!

03-03-06 - Help us name a flavor

Help us name a flavor!!!

As you know our sour apple lolly can't be green due to USDA Organic color limitations, so we are thinking of making it red and "suggesting" the image of a candy apple with a red color.

What should we name it?
1: Candied Apple Sour
2: Candy Apple Sour
3: other - please suggest

03-03-06 - Red Red Red!!!

Now that I know there is no way to make an organic "green" sour lollipop, such as "green apple sour", what do we do? Kids and adults identify green with sour apple. It's a fun flavor to chase around in your mouth as it builds up that sour steam pressure in your head. We've got to have this flavor because I love it and, more importantly, all my focus group kids are screaming for it (neighbor's kids, cousins, nephews, nieces). Can't let them down. No green, how about candy apple sour or cherry apple sour? That would make three red types - wet-face watermelon, razzmatazzberry, and a red sour apple. Too many reds? Naaah. I love red!!! Just found out today what makes up our organic red color - red cabbage extract and purple carrot extract. Talk about a healthy lollipop!!! Time to test a red apple.

03-01-06 - colors and flavor challenges

Can we have green? Is it possible to make an organic green colored lollipop? Let's ask our Organic Certification Consultant, Bob if we can use the natural green color "Chlorophyll CFR: 73.1125/732125". His reponse: "It's possible, but I would have to have a lot of additional information about it. What exactly is it's composition (including any inert or filler materials in it), how is it produced, what is the source material. A start would be product information sheets and MSDS." Oh my gosh. Every ingredient is like this. Natural, in this case chlorophyll, doesn't always qualify to be organic. Not by a long shot because you never know what grew in the soil, where it came from, and 100 other things. Regular chemical candy is made in five minutes for five cents (or less). Organic candy must adhere to a fascinatingly draconian militant philosophy of environmentalism and extraordinary food safety. I love a challenge and I'm so impressed by the strict standards set by the USDA. It's really cool to know that if we ever actually put an organic lollipop in a YummyEarth bag, it will actually be made of 100% good stuff that's safe to eat by my boy (who just turned 20 months today!!!). UPDATE: The answer is no. It is not possible to make sour organic lollipops in the fine color of green. What color would Sour Apple be? I have no idea.

02-14-06 - Lollies in hand!!!

We have lollies in hand. Our brilliant flavor friend, Mike, really came through for us. The lollipops taste great. People on the airplane, at the supermarket, my neighbors, next to me in line; they all want an organic lolly. I bravely stage impromptu tastings everywhere I go. They really taste great is what I hear over and over again. Real fruit flavors, not chemical like regular candy. Tastes better than regular candy. And so on. Holy cow!!! This could really be something.

02-13-06 - We make our first lollipops!!!

Driving down from LA to Mexico with our friendly Organic Certification Consultant, Bob, we really begin to feel the full scope of "being organic". He tells us story after story from the organic world and makes us nervous; will we be able to pull this off? Will we be able to radically change the way this small candy plant in Mexico does everything...just for us? From the organic special way they will have to store our ingredients down to having to replace the food in the rodent traps outside the building with an organic compliant Vitamin D3 food. Is it too extreme? I guess we'll find out. We meet the most friendly people ever. The people in this small candy plant are so friendly and interested in our project; it feels like family after no time. They're all trying hard to help us figure this out. From flavors to colors to syrup boiling points, there are lots of problems and lots of hands to help. Wow. I couldn't have hoped for a better situation.

02-08-06 - name and art

Lots of brainstorming. Lots of funny names. YummyEarth stands out in my mind for an instant. I call Sergio from Panera Bread (love their salads) and say...YummyEarth - what do you think. He says, "I love it!". Done. Our dream has a name. Now it needs a look. Our friend, Abbey is an artist and children's book illustrator. Maybe she can help? I call Abigail Marble and ask her for help with the lollipop package. She asks me if I have anything in mind and I defer to her and her extraordinary talent. I ask her to dream up something and surprise me. Her watercolor of Jonah and Rose floating through the air under lollipops literally brings me to tears. I love her art and love the image of our kids. This is really getting fun.

02-01-06 - Can't do this alone.

Our friends down at the Mexican candy company send us a rescue rope. They refer us to the nicest guy in the world who's been in flavors and colors for decades. This guy, Mike, takes a personal interest in our organic effort and tells us that he's going to personally develop organic and natural flavors and colors for us. Is this for real? YES!!! Please do. We breathe a bit easier. We haven't tasted anything yet, but at least someone cares.

01-24-06 - Organic ingredients?

Now we've kind of focused our search on organic tapioca syrup as our sweet liquid part of the recipe because it won't intrude on the flavors, but the cost is a fortune. Will we be able to sell this product for a reasonable price? What is a reasonable price. Can't think about that now. Must get flavors and colors. Ingredients are organic cane sugar, organic syrup of some kind, citric acid, organic and natural flavors and colors. Speaking of colors and flavors...NOBODY in the colors/flavors world wants to talk to us. Apparently our anticipated sales volume is going to be so low that it doesn't pay to develop flavors and colors. And to add insult to injury, not more than a handful of flavor companies know anything about being "organic compliant". Being organic compliant means 95% of the recipe must be certified organic by USDA standards and the other 5% has to come from a very short list of approved ingredients. Given that there is almost no organic candy market, it comes as no surprise that most flavor companies seem to want to stick to artificial color chemicals and Red Dye #4 or whatever that stuff is. But we really need flavors!

01-10-06 - How do we do organic?

This nice company in Mexico tells us to bring organic ingredients and they'll attempt a batch of lollipops for us. Hmm. So how do we figure this out? What goes into an organic lollipop. Each question brings another. Sergio and I read articles, talk to chefs, ask for help from anybody who will answer the phone. Let's just say that people have been incredibly helpful to two dads trying to make lollipops for their babies. I think they think it's cute. But we're serious about this. Okay, so we can use brown rice syrup, imported corn syrup (seems like all or most of the corn in the US is genetically modified - wow.), tapioca syrup, and the list goes on. Seems like more ingredients suppliers prefer organic tapioca syrup because it has a very neutral flavor, which means to say that it doesn't get in the way of the hopefully yummy flavors the way that brown rice syrup does. Unfortunately tapioca syrup is a bloody fortune. 8 times the price of regular corn syrup. Will our bag of lollipops cost $100?

12-15-05 - Organic candy is nowhere.

Wow!!! Nobody seems to make organic candy. Nobody seems to know anything beyond organic chocolate. Are we nuts? I kind of don't think so. As I find out what goes into a regular lollipop it makes me cringe. I would love to have this company up and running by the time that Jonah and Rose could start enjoying yummy lollipops and I don't want pesticides and yuk in them. We'll forge ahead and make this happen! But every manufacturer in the US, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, everywhere I call knows nothing from organic candy. They're all so friendly, referring me to someone else that knows nothing about organic. Sergio finds a really nice company in Mexico that makes candy for the American market that tells him that they would be willing to try making a small batch of organic candy if we bring the ingredients to them and tell them what they need to do to make sure the batch is organic. More research. What is organic? How do we do organic?

10-15-05 - What am I getting myself into?

Sergio, my pal from LA, and I always seem to get around to dreaming about marketing the perfect yummy something for other people to enjoy. We've always thought it would be so fulfilling to sell yummy things and make people happy. Sergio sells packaging equipment and I'm a telecom consultant so there's not much room for creative flavor there. I guess it has always been an adult kind of food we dreamed about marketing. But now we have two babies, he has Rose and I have Jonah. We are both work at home dads and really live the baby life about 24/7. Organic food has been such a big part of that as we've learned about pesticides and genetically modified foods (GMO) and metals and bug parts and other yuk that we try to keep away from our kids and ourselves, now, too. So Sergio comes into the city for a wedding and is feeding Jonah some homemade rice pudding at the diner and we decide to turn the dream into a reality or at least try. We'd slow down our other pursuits and make organic lollippos that we could feed our kids. It was decided between Jonah's eager bites of rice pudding. What am I getting myself into?