Posted on Leave a comment

Basically Food Update (inventory)

Basically Food logoHi everyone,

So, September came and went with no new Basically Food inventory in sight! All that’s left is BURN and BALANCE cinnamon, much of which is bad-tasting product that requires replacements or refunds. What’s going on? :o

First of all, I’m really sorry that things have gotten to this point, and that you haven’t been able to get the food that you depend on. :( We have been doing our best, but new problems have continued to pile up and block progress. Fortunately though, we finally have confirmation from our manufacturer that the first few production runs are underway and we expect to have them available to ship to you, our customers, in November. Early November if we’re lucky, late November if we’re not.

BOOST and BUILD chocolate and BOOST vanilla are in the process of ingredient ordering, and will be added to the production schedule to be mixed and packaged once the slowest ingredient (many pallets of oat flour) arrives sometime in October. They will try to give our production runs priority, they say, given how long we’ve been waiting.

It’s been over a year. :|

So, you’ll be able to get BOOST, BUILD, and BURN chocolate and BOOST vanilla in early November if we’re lucky, late November if we’re not. Or, maybe even late October if we’re really lucky, maybe sometime in December if we’re really unlucky. Fingers crossed.

But why are we a few months behind schedule relative to the last update? And what’s going on with BURN chocolate? And BALANCE? And the other flavors?

So, you ever run into the problem where, say, you’ve spent 8 or 9 years honing your recipes and figuring out the best suppliers to get each ingredient from, and then you tell a manufacturer to follow your recipe exactly with a particular mixing process and use the exact suppliers that you’ve requested, but then they decide that this seems way too easy and assume that you actually want them to reinterpret your recipe as if each line is specifying the amount of each nutrient that should show up on the label rather than in the formula itself, without asking you, and then add several times the amount of each mineral ingredient and a bit too much of certain other ingredients, and then, after a long delay to calculate these “corrections”, proudly send you a bunch of samples to approve, which taste inexplicably off? And then they take days or weeks to respond to your inquiries trying to figure out why? No? Well, that happened to us, recently.

That’s what happened after our last update at the end of June. Of course, we didn’t find out that’s what happened until a few weeks ago! But now we know.

Anyway, we finally got that squared away and clarified, and now we’re just waiting on the corrected (well, the version without their “corrections”) BURN chocolate sample to make sure they’ve got it right, and then they’ll start ordering ingredients for that once we’ve approved it. So BURN chocolate will probably come a bit later in November. Hopefully.

BURN and BUILD vanilla, as well as BALANCE vanilla and chocolate, will come after – not sure when. We ordered enough of our custom vitamin mix to cover the first four runs, but we’ll have to make a second order of vitamins to cover these next four runs. And that will take at least another couple months from when we pull the trigger.

Before we spend a bunch of money on that, though, we want to see this latest manufacturer get our first run completed without the quality issues (fishy DHA, bad-tasting cinnamon, mixing inconsistencies, and so on) of the previous manufacturer. If they fail at that, we’ll need to have some money set aside to try out yet another manufacturer, else our game is over. But in the meantime, we’ll push as far as we can into the ordering process, short of spending our money, so we can hit the ground running once we see how they do with BOOST and BUILD chocolate.

Also in the meantime, we’ll renew our search for alternative manufacturers, ideally those that specialize in food rather than supplements (and know how to follow a recipe) and are willing to work with client-supplied ingredients. Preferably a bit closer to us in California or near our Illinois distribution warehouse, for faster turnaround times and lower freight costs. Would be nice! :d

Our mistake was in overcommitting to the first manufacturer that seemed decent (but actually, wasn’t) instead of continuing to search until we found several promising candidates to choose from. Getting this right, doing the work to find the Right Manufacturer™ for us, is the most critical piece to the long-term survival (and thrive-al) of this business, after, you know, having product inventory available to buy again. Relationships are hard sometimes.

As far as cinnamon, plain, and our Basically Protein and the like, we’ll have to see how much money we have left over after replenishing vanilla and chocolate, our most popular flavors. There might not be much. :p If we’re lucky, though, we’ll find a manufacturer willing to do some smaller runs for us as a favor alongside our larger chocolate and vanilla runs, such that we could afford to maintain our (somewhat unwieldy) SKU count.

It’s tricky though. Once we have product in stock again and we find a reliable manufacturing partner, cash flow will become our biggest bottleneck. That would be a nice problem to have. Money is just numbers, right? Easy. ;)

Anyway, I’m so sorry again about the interminable delays and ongoing lack of food here for sale at Basically Food. I feel really bad about it, and also, your frequent emails and comments asking when things will be back in stock gives me hope that what we’re doing is worth it, and that, once we can get these production issues sorted, there will be a glorious future ahead for all of us. That would be real nice. :o

Also, if you are out of your favorite (basically) food and you want some help with DIY recipes to cover the intervening time interval, send me an email and I’ll help you out. :)

Thank you for caring. <3

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.