For several, several weeks, we debated whether to try to have a booth at our local Hot Air Balloon Festival. The first year we started having the Hot Air Balloon Festival again a couple years ago, it had such a huge turnout they weren’t expecting that all the vendors had hour long lines and ran out of everything. Since then, they implemented rules wanting vendors to have at least 3 people working and enough product to serve 750 people. They didn’t want to have a repeat and get a reputation for being a poorly run festival, which then nobody would attend.
Having 3 people working wouldn’t be too difficult. I knew my mom would help me, and my sister could fill in if needed as well. But having enough product to serve 750 people? The Hot Air Balloons have to have just the right conditions to take off – no rain and the wind can’t be over 10 miles per hour. If you don’t have those conditions, or if it’s too hot (since it’s done at our local airport there is no shade), how well is the Festival going to be attended? I’m not regularly open, so if I don’t sell through the product at the festival, I don’t have an outlet to sell it afterward.
Heat treating the flour for edible cookie dough - gotta love a big oven like this! |
50 lbs. of lemons to squeeze for lemonade. |
Finally, about 10 days before the festival, the weather forecast had no rain, it was supposed to be hot, and the wind – well, that’s hard to say but most days the forecast said 11 – 15 mph. A little high, but hopefully it would be okay. I decided I would “take the jump.” I decided to offer Iced Cold Brew Coffee, with beans roasted locally by Jackrabbit Coffee in Hiawatha, KS. I would premix in milk for the festival to make things go faster and it would be available either plain, or with in-house made caramel or mocha syrup. We would also have Iced Loose Leaf Brewed Tea with tea leaves from The Tea Smith in Omaha, NE and Fresh Squeezed Real Lemonade. Both of these would also be available plain or with in-house made fresh strawberry or peach syrup and/or popping pearls. I figured if I made 20 gallons of each drink, it would be enough for 350 – 400 servings – not nearly what we were supposed to have, but I would also have 240 bottles of water to come closer.
I wanted to have a snack of some sort as well as the drinks, so I decided to also offer brownie bites, edible cookie dough in birthday cake, chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chip, peanut butter & snickerdoodle, and candied popcorn in a few fruit flavors. Because I like everything to be as fresh as possible and I underestimated how long it would take to make stuff all by myself, I only got all the drinks, syrups, brownie bites and two kinds of edible cookie dough finished after staying up until 1:00 am Friday night and getting back up at 5:00 am Saturday morning and calling my mom in to help Saturday morning.
Our stand at the Hot Air Balloon Festival |
The view from our stand as the sun sets and they put on a show with their fire, since they can't actually blow up their balloons. |
Saturday afternoon came and we got our booth setup at the festival. It was a hot evening with no rain to be seen, but there was a nice wind to help keep things a little cooler – but also forced the balloons to not be able to take off. The newspaper says there was about 2,200 in attendance. We went through about 7 gallons of lemonade, 2 gallons of tea and a gallon of coffee, serving around 75 drinks. We also went through probably between one and two dozen cookie dough/brownie bites. If you do the math… + - * / … that means we had A LOT of stuff left over!!!
It was an interesting and fun event to do, but we definitely learned a lot too. For one, we can’t do an event that requires us to have so much stuff, especially when we don’t have a regular way to sell the extra if we don’t sell it. We did decide to try opening out shop a few hours during the day on Sunday and also Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings since I don’t work my other overnight job those nights. Hopefully we could sell some of our extra during these times, but we aren’t normally open and it’s hard to get word out on such short notice. Since we were going to be open in our shop, we added rolled ice cream to help bring more customers in with the cookie dough / brownie bites as the only available flavors to help use them. The rolled ice cream definitely helped – it was our most popular item. We went through another couple gallons or so of our drinks as well and got some recognition and reputation started, so it was a good thing, but we still had a lot of waste.
Thank you to a local business, who wanted to remain anonymous, for letting me store the 60 gallons of drinks in their walk-in for several hours before and a couple days after the event, and to A&G Restaurant for letting me store the remainder in their walk-ins after that. I so appreciate everything the community helps me with!
Our front A/C must have a Freon leak and needs replaced |
One more expensive surprise, like our last post discussed about our fuse box, we learned our air conditioner that cools the front of our shop wasn’t working very well. Since we aren’t actually open, we haven’t been keeping it cool, so we didn’t know until we turned it on for these few days. It was in the 90s most of these days and our shop stayed between 86 and 94. We had Jones Air Conditioning come look at it, and it’s out of Freon and it’s an old unit that takes a kind that isn’t made anymore – it would be in the lower hundreds just to recharge it, plus labor to try to find the leak – and if they can find the leak, hopefully be able to fix it. The other alternative is to replace it with a newer, more efficient unit. We’re getting a price for that to see if it’s something we want to do now, or if we want to try to cobble something together from another unit that cools the back room (which we have blocked off) to force it to cool the front room until we get closer to actual opening. Either way, we have to do something before the end of August so it is cool when we’re open for Cobblestone. Always run in to those surprises! :)
We aren’t totally out on all of our excess product. We are having our Fairy Floss at another softball tournament with the local girl scouts concessions this weekend, and they agreed to let us bring our brownie bites & edible cookie dough to sell as well and we're donating as much tea as they need for the weekend. We also have a local restaurant, A&G Restaurant, who is taking our lemonade and selling it – and hopefully, possibly offering it in the future as well? So, we still have quite a bit of waste, but hopefully it won’t be as bad as it could have been – and it was a good learning experience!