I know that some people will use any excuse for a celebration, but I have just found out that our cousins across the pond in the good ole US of A, actually celebrate National Cotton Candy Day on 7th December! What a great excuse for a party.

Speaking of cotton candy, or candy floss as it is more popularly known here (the australians call it fairy floss), we are putting some effort into upgrading our online store. Located at CANDY FLOSS STORE we have seen a steady but unspectacular stream of sales through this outlet. We are now looking at expanding and promoting the store to increase this side of our business.

I am just about to jump in the bath as we are off to London again this evening, followed by Chelmsford tomorrow, London again Thursday, a day off Friday (although day off refers to me doing work other than actually operating equipment), Saturday will see us in Blackburn and London yet again. I think looking at it London now accounts for some 40% of our overall business.

We have also just been approved as preferred suppliers to a company operating some 49 sites throughout the UK, so that should develop into a nice steady stream of work.

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Our initial catering line consisted of candy floss and popcorn. Over the course of time we were asked for various items, anything that was requested regularly we decided would make a good line, and in due course we added it to our portfolio. Some lines such as mulled wine, I decided to try "blind" as it were, with quite good results as over the winter months Mulled wine was one of our best lines. Since the end of winter the mulled wine jobs have dried up completely, pretty obvious really as it is a traditional winter drink.

To hopefully take advantage of the warmer summer months (although the great British summertime being what it is means that mulled wine could well be a popular line) we have just put deals in place to supply a line of cold drinks. Our initial offerings are Thick Milk Shakes, Slush, Frozen Cocktails and Pure Fruit Juice.

Our range of ice cream carts are also in regular use, and now we have a reliable supplier of quality Kulfi Ice Cream, we are hoping that will be popular in the speciality Asian wedding market.

Over the next few months we have a number of other new catering products that we will be making available to our client base, so by the end of the summer we should have the most comprehensive line up of traditional catering carts in the U.K.

Our composting initiative is working at full steam now, we haven't actually had a finished load of compost from it yet, but that has been down to two reasons. Firstly, as we arrange catering packages for set numbers of people, we tend to generate a lot less waste than the days when we attended traditional funfairs, also the composter is operating at quite a high temperature, and degrading food waste so rapidly that we can have it half full one day, go back a week later and the level has dropped noticeably. I don't understand the full chemistry behind the process, but it seems that microbiological organisms convert the food waste into carbon dioxide gas.


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The food standards agency are currently trialling nutritional labeling for caterers. Manufacturers are already printing their products with labels showing calories, fat, sodium content etc, but catering companies have not had to do this. At the moment its a voluntary scheme being tried by a limited number of companies and overseen by the FSA. However many trial schemes tend to be ramped up to compulsory schemes at some point, so we have decided to adopt nutritional labeling on our own initiative. All of our carts, (with some 12 different products) have been issued with plaques containing the vital statistics. The next step is to add this data to our main catering website, Candy Floss Crazy.

As the website runs to some 490 pages, it is a reasonably lengthy procedure. We have started already, and candy floss, popcorn and hot dogs have had a small button added in the top right hand corner of the screen. This is labeled INFO/NUTRITION, and when clicked displays the data for that particular cart. We hope to have had all of the pages altered by the end of the month, but as we are currently operating around a dozen websites amounting to over 3000 pages, its a job that is being farmed out to some of the companies we use occasionally to update our sites. The button is shown below.



March has started even better than the first two months of the year. In the 6 days to press, we have received 80% of our total inquiries for the WHOLE of March last year. Add to this another half dozen bookings for March (two thirds of which are in central London) and we are starting to see levels of business that we don't normally receive until around June/July.

We are also due to announce a new concept in carts (along with a number of new lines), this will be designed for smaller events such as dinner parties or weddings which are attended by smaller numbers of guests than a typical corporate event, (for some reason folk in London seem to throw an awful lot of dinner events, but being designed for large numbers of people, our usual cart services are a little bit overkill), this will enable us to offer a better value service in this particular market and we aim to increase our London based workload substantially.

The other news this week is that we have finally sourced a reliable, provider for Kulfi Ice Cream, this is an Asian delicacy, very similar to ice cream, but with a much creamier texture. As we attended a high number of Asian weddings last year we hope that this will prove to be a popular choice.

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Look at this link, Medical Candy Floss Breakthrough. It seems that humble candy floss could herald a breakthrough treatment for burns victims requiring skin grafts.

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