Thursday, September 13, 2007
Review and Opinion: Old Wessex Ltd. 5 Grain Cereal
Cooler weather is rolling into our part of New England, and that usually gets me thinking about hot cereal. There has been increasing evidence that various non-wheat grains are good for health, largely due to dietary fiber. Old Wessex Ltd. 5 Grain Cereal not only has 20 g of dietary fiber in one serving, but it tastes good. A combination of oats, rye, triticale, barley, and golden flax, it looks a bit like oatmeal before being cooked. There's a nutty overtone to the taste, and the microwave directions are not only easy, but effective. You put half a cup of the cereal and a cup of water in a microwave-proof dish, put it on for five minutes, and out it comes with the type of creamy consistency that you might expect of cooking on the stove. (Actually, there have been times I've cooked quasi-ready oatmeal on the stove top and had less of a pleasing texture.)
Labels: 5 grain, barley, cereal, golden flax, hot, oats, Old Wessex, rye, triticale
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Review: Captain Spongefoot Buffalo Wing Chipotle Table Sauces
Sometimes I try products more or less in the order in which they arrive, sometimes I get delayed with one for various reasons (usually of my poor filing), and sometimes I bump one up front. That's what happened with the Captain Spongefoot Buffalo Wing Sauce and Chipotle Table Sauce, sent by the company's PR agency. Hey, we had wings in the freezer and lots of mouths to fill.
I can give these two products a rave with an important caveat, which I'll save for close to the end. The buffalo wing sauce had a better flavor than most wings I've had in restaurants and the recipe on the Tabasco Sauce bottle. Ingredients were great: a mix of hot peppers, clarified butter, vinegar, garlic, some unnamed spiced. I pretty much could pronounce everything on the label. The sauce had nuance, balancing a moderate amount of burn and pepper flavor with tang, unlike many versions where the vinegar aroma goes right up into your nose in an unpleasant way.
I had less hope for the chipotle sauce because of my own tastes - generally the amount of smoke is overkill. But if anything I may have liked this one more than the other variety - it's tough to tell after going back and forth with wings and thinking, "I need a bit more of this ... no, maybe that." Again, a well designed recipe.
I had received some gift pack version with a 5-ounce bottle each of the sauces. Each comes with a shaker top which lets you easily treat wings - or anything else - with a few dashes. My wife suggested using the sauce with left-over chicken in a wrap sandwich, which sounds like a great idea to me. The problem, though, is distribution. Right now you can get the products in Colorado, but you can't count on easily finding it elsewhere, to my knowledge. There is an online outlet, but it appears to be a third party's selling more than just this company's sauces.
[UPDATE: some of the shipping price info has changed - I'll explain at the end.]
One 5-ounce bottle is $3.85 and the price to ship UPS ground is ... wait for it ... $9.14 to western Massachusetts. That's right, two and a third times more expensive than the product itself.
This is a serious problem and will - and should - keep many from buying the products. If you're desperate for a good wing fix for a party, you could try the 12-ounce bottle at $5.65 for the product and the $9.14 shipping if you're as far from Colorado as I am - or two of those bottles for $9.75. In other words, someone is probably treating shipping as a profit center. Now, the Captain Spongefoot (sorry, the name seems goofy to me) people don't seem to be the ones at fault, but if they want more customers, they should find a way to address this. I'll be sad when my supply runs out, but unless I can get a local store to buy a case, I don't think I'll be picking up more.
Now, for that explanation. I sent a link to the review to the PR contact for the sauce company. A little while ago, a comment waiting for moderation hit my inbox:
But I know that regular shippers do get discounts - I used to work at a direct response company and am aware of the drill. My bet is that Captain Spongefoot (Why do I keep thinking Spongebob Squarepants?) had nothing to do with it, but that the distributor is claiming to be paying actual invoiced rates, and, I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. And it does make me wonder why the distributor dropped the far cheaper surface mail option without telling the sauce vendor. Finally, even if buying multiple bottles at once could cut the shipping cost per bottle (assuming that shipping two pounds wasn't twice as expensive as shipping one), who wants to have to buy extra bottles that you don't need to use then?
[And another update.... It appears that the anonymous comment came from the distributor, not the sauce company or PR rep. I didn't think it was for the latter given the email she had sent me, though I thought that someone at Captain Spongefoot might have left it without thinking of putting in a name. Ah, well, mystery solved.)
I can give these two products a rave with an important caveat, which I'll save for close to the end. The buffalo wing sauce had a better flavor than most wings I've had in restaurants and the recipe on the Tabasco Sauce bottle. Ingredients were great: a mix of hot peppers, clarified butter, vinegar, garlic, some unnamed spiced. I pretty much could pronounce everything on the label. The sauce had nuance, balancing a moderate amount of burn and pepper flavor with tang, unlike many versions where the vinegar aroma goes right up into your nose in an unpleasant way.
I had less hope for the chipotle sauce because of my own tastes - generally the amount of smoke is overkill. But if anything I may have liked this one more than the other variety - it's tough to tell after going back and forth with wings and thinking, "I need a bit more of this ... no, maybe that." Again, a well designed recipe.
I had received some gift pack version with a 5-ounce bottle each of the sauces. Each comes with a shaker top which lets you easily treat wings - or anything else - with a few dashes. My wife suggested using the sauce with left-over chicken in a wrap sandwich, which sounds like a great idea to me. The problem, though, is distribution. Right now you can get the products in Colorado, but you can't count on easily finding it elsewhere, to my knowledge. There is an online outlet, but it appears to be a third party's selling more than just this company's sauces.
[UPDATE: some of the shipping price info has changed - I'll explain at the end.]
One 5-ounce bottle is $3.85 and the price to ship UPS ground is ... wait for it ... $9.14 to western Massachusetts. That's right, two and a third times more expensive than the product itself.
This is a serious problem and will - and should - keep many from buying the products. If you're desperate for a good wing fix for a party, you could try the 12-ounce bottle at $5.65 for the product and the $9.14 shipping if you're as far from Colorado as I am - or two of those bottles for $9.75. In other words, someone is probably treating shipping as a profit center. Now, the Captain Spongefoot (sorry, the name seems goofy to me) people don't seem to be the ones at fault, but if they want more customers, they should find a way to address this. I'll be sad when my supply runs out, but unless I can get a local store to buy a case, I don't think I'll be picking up more.
Now, for that explanation. I sent a link to the review to the PR contact for the sauce company. A little while ago, a comment waiting for moderation hit my inbox:
The shipping rates that are used are the published rates with NO ADDITIONAL MARK UP. The third party distributor does not add one penny to the cost of shipping. Shipping costs are calculated by weight of the packed being shipped and the destination it is being shipped to. It has nothing to do with the cost of the product in the package.And then I got another email, this time directly from the PR person. Here's part of it:
Thank you for the great review of the sauce, AND for bringing the shipping problem to our attention! The company had requested Centennial Food Distributors to add a U.S. Postal Service option to the shipping section quite some time ago, but it was inadvertently dropped by Centennial for some unknown reason.Let's address the anonymous comment. As I wrote the PR contact:
If you look at the product purchase page now, the cost to send you that same 5 oz bottle to your house is $4.60 via the least expensive U.S. mail option. It actually costs even more, $4.72 to send ME the same bottle to my home right here in Colorado. Any sauce (or product for that matter) you order from anywhere in the country will have a large shipping charge, which is why it’s best to order multiple bottles at the same time.
I really, really, really dislike anonymous comments, especially when it’s obvious that they are coming from a company representative or PR person. That’s the main reason I have moderation in place on my site – because I’ve even had people try to dampen the effect of a mixed or negative review by people whose language and speed of reply gave them away as interested parties.Now, I'm sure the sauce company wasn't making money on the shipping, but I'd make a bet that the distributor was. Even FedEx Home Delivery charges $9.14 for the same roughly one pound to be sent along roughly the same route - and that's for someone without a regular shipping discount checking the rate on the web. When I looked at UPS, it was about the same, including a 50 cent fuel surcharge.
But I know that regular shippers do get discounts - I used to work at a direct response company and am aware of the drill. My bet is that Captain Spongefoot (Why do I keep thinking Spongebob Squarepants?) had nothing to do with it, but that the distributor is claiming to be paying actual invoiced rates, and, I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. And it does make me wonder why the distributor dropped the far cheaper surface mail option without telling the sauce vendor. Finally, even if buying multiple bottles at once could cut the shipping cost per bottle (assuming that shipping two pounds wasn't twice as expensive as shipping one), who wants to have to buy extra bottles that you don't need to use then?
[And another update.... It appears that the anonymous comment came from the distributor, not the sauce company or PR rep. I didn't think it was for the latter given the email she had sent me, though I thought that someone at Captain Spongefoot might have left it without thinking of putting in a name. Ah, well, mystery solved.)
Labels: Captain Spongefoot, hot, opinion, review, sauce, wings
