Entry #433052, added on 06-13-06 @ 12:14 am EDT
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| All the Juicy Green Juice | Entry #433052 |
Wheatgrass for juicing is just that—grass, which is grown and harvested within ten days of being planted, having grown to a height of five to seven inches. It is beautiful, lush green and succulent—looks just about like a flat of gorgeous grass, probably because it is a flat of gorgeous grass. It is grown in flats and carried to the juice bars where it is kept in coolers until it is cut and juiced. The important thing about wheatgrass is having it fresh, for the nutrients begin to diminish within thirty minutes of the grass being cut. Therefore, having a fresh, ready local supply is important to the consumer. We delivered three times a week. Our problem, since we had the knowledge and the expertise and were good at growing the grass has always been lack of funds to get everything set up properly to keep the grass from becoming moldy. The mold is non-toxic, but most people are too finicky to want to have it growing in the bottom of their wheatgrass, even though the mold itself is not on the part of the grass they will be juicing.
When we started the first wheatgrass business, we started it in Smithville, which is close to Bastrop and a few miles farther from Austin. We had a back room which was almost ideal for a growing room—concrete floor, almost closed in. All we had to do was seal off the one remaining outside wall, put in the air conditioning and go, right? Wrong. Our biggest clients were always the Whole Foods stores. Whole Foods has gone national now and is heading for world-wide with more than 120 stores in the United States as of our last count a little over a year ago. What you may not know is that Whole Foods originated in Austin with the corporate offices still located there. At the time we began to grow wheatgrass, Whole Foods was starting to stretch its muscles and put out feelers to open all these new stores across the nation.
With expansion always comes massive attacks of legalese, which tends to mess up a lot of the original mission statement aims and goals and replace it with new policies to cover the corporate backsides in case someone comes along and decides to sue for some kind of trumped-up damages ... like maybe ... Felicity Fickle Face with the frantic fumbling fingers, who accidentally flopped her hand in the fig bin and came out with a handful of flaccid figs or fragrant flies flumping around on more than fifty carefully configured figs, flipped and flung said figs far afield, finally floundering on the floor in front of a flood of fascinated and focused Filipinos after slipping on a spilt frozen frappe and fractured her foot. WELL! So what if Felicity Fickle Face felt the need to force Whole Foods to foot the bill and add a few mil in the process? Clearly, protections needed to be in place to cover all the fantastic fateful contingencies which might follow ...
Ah, yes, and the legalese can get pretty fierce indeed. At the insistence of the new corporate lawyers, Whole Foods required any and all of its suppliers who claimed to be growing organic products, which at the time were the cornerstone of their business, to be immediately and legally certified to be organic indeed. Add to our growing process organic certification by the state, which included, but was not limited to, ANNUAL soil testing, seed testing and onsite inspection of the premises (for a healthy fee, of course) and might take anywhere from a few days to months after requesting said inspection before the inspector arrived and did the inspection. Once he had inspected and taken all the samples, there was still a waiting period of at least a month before the certification was returned and we were cleared to be vendors. The smaller juice bars didn’t care about the certification and still mostly don’t, but the twelve or fifteen trays a week we could sell to them was hardly enough to keep us going. An example of the beautiful bludgeonings of bureaucracy in bountiful bloom.
We went through the process and finally started our little business and did great! UNTIL ... winter and spring came to an end and the temperatures began to climb the way they will in Central Texas. Then we had a problem ....
To be Continued .. |
© Copyright 2006 Chalaedra (UN: chalaedra at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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