10 Out of 10 Stars.
So, I didn’t intend to drop off the grid for the past week…but OH, GOODNESS. I’m not sure I’ve ever worked harder in my life than I did last week as we prepared for the Veterans United Holiday Light Show. (And rest assured, any statements about myself fully applies to Jeanne and Team PJP. We all worked relentlessly for a series of 18 hour days and no one was spared from the early morning to late night schedule.)
So, as you probably have seen by now, we were lucky enough to participate in the holiday light show on two nights - last Wednesday and last Saturday. We provided 1,000 boxes for the first night and 1,600 for the second. Each adorable box contained tarts and Jeanne’s famous cookies…oh, and a PJP menu card, an ingredient card, and a coupon for a 20% discount on a January 2021 purchase. So what goes into making thousands of tarts and thousands of cookies over the course of the week while keeping a storefront fully operational? Well, here you go:
To start with, we began the week before by ordering so many supplies that items arrived on pallets via semi-truck. We chose a super cute gable box because we could source 2,600 of them easily. 10 out of 10 stars for the presentation.
And Emma, often responsible for the pie art you see on social media, took to her iPad and designed a sticker for the boxes that featured a Christmas wreath around the PJP logo. Even after stickering 2,600 boxes, I still admired her design and was so proud of the brand representation. 10 out of 10 stars for multi-talented Team PJP members.
And then you order an insane amount of ingredients from your food brokers. Have you ever ordered 230 pounds of peanut butter? That’s 46 five pound tubs and for all the extra space we’ve sang the praises of in our new space, it didn’t even matter when it came to the food deliveries last week. 10 out of 10 stars for not running out of any ingredients though.
Finally, you start working on a plan to bake thousands of tarts and cookies. First, you do all the regular store baking schedule, which takes longer than normal because you are busy for the holiday. Then you start in on the schedule created to meet production for all the boxes. And you quickly realize that you need a lot of extra help building the boxes, filling them with paper shred (in colors from our brand board), and stickering the outside with Emma’s sticker. So you bring in siblings and friends of Team PJP and buy them pizza and assign them all non-baking tasks. 10 out of 10 stars for all the people who moved their schedules around and built boxes for hours.
Oh, and after you bake everything, you wait for it to cool down, individually bag it, fill the boxes, and then carry the boxes to the 15 foot U-haul we rented and backed up to our back door. (Fun fact, it took over two hours to unload the truck on Saturday night.). 10 out of 10 stars for U-Haul though…I feel like commercial storage vehicles level up our story a bit.
Without question, we couldn’t appreciate this opportunity more if we tried…and there is never a way to thank Veterans United enough for including us. We have completed some crazy big projects at PJP in the past and every time we achieve success, I feel like we just moved up a level in our game. I think last week’s experience was the top ever in difficulty, but it bumped us to expert level FOR SURE. 10 out of 10 stars.
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