April 2013 Road Trip is a Big Success!
The month of April 2013 has really been a busy one. Spring is here and it was time to travel to the Carolinas and Tennessee to restock our retailers and attract some new ones. Our first visit was to Charlotte, NC. We did a tasting at The Meat House/Charlotte on a Saturday afternoon and moved 4 cases of sauce! It was our first visit for a tasting there and we enjoyed spending some time with Tonda Bynum who had helped us in the area last year.
From Charlotte, we stopped in Waynesville, NC to visit Home Tech The Kitchen Shop on Main Street. It was great seeing owner Bob Lang again and our tasting on a Sunday afternoon was a success. The following Monday morning we headed for Cleveland, Tennessee and delivered a large quantity of cases to Cookes Food Stores. We hope to be back there in mid June for their Grills Gone Wild Barbecue event. We then had lunch with Barbara and Dave Olson and got on the road heading toward the Raleigh area.
Tuesday, we met Kelly Shatat, owner of Moon and Lola fashion jewelry, headquartered in Apex, NC, and she introduced us to Betty Buchanan, owner of Surcee Gifts, also in Apex. Betty decided that Surcee’s would be a great retail location for E’s Best and we agreed! Surcee will be doing a tasting at a large local event the weekend of May 5-7. Over 50,000 people are expected to come through this beautiful little “Mayberry-like” town. We then met our friend Anna Ver Steeg in Raleigh for lunch before heading to the Wilmington, NC area to visit our daughter Kristyn and Her husband Hudson, and to also do some prospecting there as well. In WIlmington, we picked up Pine Valley Market as a new retailer as we sampled sauces with co-owner Christi Ferretti.
As we traveled back to Florida later in the week, we received a call from Mark Weeden at The Meat House in WInter Park, FL, informing us that they would like to carry our sauces! So, it was a hectic but fun work trip and a very productive effort for E’s Best. We logged over 2500 miles in 6 days of travel to North Carolina and Tennessee.
Meanwhile back in Florida, we are getting ready to celebrate our 1st complete year in business as E’s Best Barbecue, LLC. May 15 commemorates our very first bottling day and we will be celebrating by conducting a tasting on Memorial Day weekend at The Chop Shop in Bradenton, FL.
God continues to show us the way and we take everything one step at a time. We sense that some amazing things are going to take place this year but we will just be patient and see where God leads us. As we approach a year of doing this, neither Jan nor I could have predicted this time last year, how blessed we would be today. As of this writing, we have 37 retail partners and we are continuing to grow. Hopefully we will have some big news about another key retail partner soon. Thanks again to all of our retailers and all of you who have tried our sauce and keep coming back for more. We are truly humbled by what continues to take place with E’s Best!
God bless,
E & Jan