sofi Awards

Hello everyone! Apologies for the spotty blog entries recently. We have been really busy with the launch of our improved, more natural cupola cookies and our brand new savory snacks, cupola clouds. Our days have been spent touching base with numerous retailers and sending them samples of our products. The response has been positive overall, but with the Easter holiday upon us, many of our contacts at the retailers where we would like to get on the shelves have been quite busy.

Since cupola cookies and cupola clouds are now available in custom-printed boxes, which are simple but more visually appealing, higher quality and more shelf-friendly than our previous packaging, we are able to approach a lot more retail locations than we were in the past. So far we've reached out to more retailers in PA, OH, NY, VA, MA, NH and FL.

But today, I wanted to talk about the sofi Awards, because they have been on my mind a lot lately. Up until last year, the sofi Awards used to be called the Product Awards. The competition is sponsored by NASFT (National Association for the Specialty Food Trade and is the specialty food industry's premiere product competition (The Oscar or Tony Awards for the specialty food industry if you will). This year, there are over 32 different award categories, such as Outstanding Pasta Sauce, Outstanding Salad Dressing and Outstanding Chocolate.

It's pretty interesting to see what products and companies have won awards in the past. NASFT features this information in the Product Awards section of their site. I warn you though, that you will work up an appetite as you check out the award winners and finalists.

Each year NASFT receives about 2,000 entries for the competition, so the competition, in the words of Christian Siriano, winner of this season's Project Runway, is FIERCE! But we think our cupola cookies and our cupola clouds have that something special, so we're going to enter them into the competition this year. Whether we place or not, I think it will be a good experience for us and we'll learn a lot about our products and how they measure up to the competition.

On your mark, get set, eat!