It may seem like I’ve been gone for a while but I am still here and up to my usual daily goings-on at The Yum Company! The only difference is that I’ve been much busier of late and although I would love to say I’ve just returned from a restful and refreshing holiday, unfortunately for me that’s not the case. That’s the trouble with running a business – you sometimes feel that you’re swimming underwater and need to come up for air! And I figured it was about time…
Those of you who follow what I’m up to at The Yum Company may be aware that I’ve also been busy working on Green Cyprus, The Yum Company’s sister site. I wanted to have an outlet for all things green, organic and eco-friendly covering aspects which stretched beyond the boundaries of food, and so setting up a site to cater for the broader audience seemed like a good thing to do. And that’s why I’ve been busier lately – not just preparing meals, but lots of new content for the Green Cyprus site too!
Being a good sister, Green Cyprus also carries news about The Yum Company and vice versa! It’s good to see that many Yum Company followers are now following Green Cyprus too.
Back at The Yum Company, life has as usual been pretty hectic and anyone running their own company will identify with this. As we approach the summer and business tends to slow down here in Cyprus, I am looking forward to finding some time to devote to working on some new aspects of the business including the addition of some new recipes to the range. I’ve had that on my to-do list for ages but there always seems to be many other diversions.
Developing new recipes may seem like an obvious thing to do and you may wonder why it can take so long to implement. The fact is, it’s a costly exercise. Not only do you have the new packaging costs and sourcing of new organic ingredients – but also nutritional analysis and shelf-life testing for each new addition to the range.
Then you have the distribution issue. At the moment, we’re still small and looking for other suitable outlets to place our meals and this takes time as you have to battle through the various organisational layers in the supermarkets! Then there’s all the associated costs with them actually allowing you to place the products on their shelves which can be prohibitive and indeed was for us with one major chain.
Fairly recently, some of you may recall that we were about to launch our new organic houmous. It tastes absolutely delicious and we were flooded with compliments when we sampled it at an event but the supermarket in question would not stock it. They explained their reasons but nevertheless, it was disappointing. However, our houmous is waiting in the wings. We hope that once the business grows, we will find an outlet for that too but as you can see, it’s not an easy road!
Moving onto a different but food-related subject, I would like to remind readers once again about the importance of avoiding chemical toxins in food. On the Green Cyprus site I recently posted an article about the dangers of 10 widely used chemicals and mixtures of chemicals including lead, methylmercury, organochlorine pesticides, endocrine disruptors such as bisphenol-A and phthalates, exhaust fumes, and flame retardants. You can read more about this and their effects on the developing brain on my site but I wanted to re-iterate once again, the importance of eating organic, unadulterated food since, because as we have come to expect, pesticides are once again implicated in this recent study.
The message is clear and as we have access to a fairly good variety of organic foods here in Cyprus we can certainly attempt to eliminate pesticides from our dinner plates. For further information about why you should eat organic, visit The Yum Company’s website
Back at The Yum Company, as the week’s production schedule draws to a close, (and with Green Cyprus just about up and running) things have now calmed down a little… Finally there’s a chance to come up for some air and take a breather!
