A Day in the Life at One Planet

Dear Friends;

Every day at One Planet Granola, we go about our business of baking, packaging and selling our granolas. I want to share with you how we each spend our time keeping our granola-making business running.

As many of you know, my daughter Sandra and I are the main force behind One Planet Granola. Like every mother-daughter team, we’ve had our ups and downs, our fun times and not so fun times. But through it all, we’ve kept our eye on the goal of providing the best product we can for our customers.

As the company has grown, we’ve each taken on roles that fit our individual talents.
Sandra uses her amazing communication, organizational and problem solving skills to run all of the company’s sales and marketing. She spends a lot of time on the computer and on the road, managing brokers, sales reps and distributors to get our granolas onto store shelves. Sandra never takes anything personally, which is so important for sales work. She loves traveling to check on our products and talk to buyers so she can get to know them personally.

I’m fortunate that Sandra loves her role at our company because I don’t like sales at all! I would rather be in the kitchen making the granola and that is where you are most likely to find me. We make all our granola to order.  When orders come in from our sales reps, we bake and package it up that day. We start baking in the early morning making each batch by hand.  We chop figs, ginger and mango, melt the butter and mix the honey. I love being in the kitchen while the heavenly aroma of our baking granola fills the air.

When the granola is done, we bring it to room temperature and add the dry fruit. Then we package each and every bag one at a time.  We’re still shopping for the right packaging machine to make this part of our process more efficient!

Unfortunately, my job also includes a lot of paper work. I track and update our inventory of more than 60 ingredients to be sure we have what we need to fill our orders. I buy ingredients from many different sources and the process is not always smooth sailing.  Sometime items are back ordered or out of stock and I have to find new sources. I also keep track of all our certifications and permits, including documentation of our organic ingredients and our health permits. Sometimes, I feel like I’m in the paper filing business not the food business!

There is so much to learn we grow our business! Not so long ago, we made all our granola in our little café oven, baking four half-sheets at time. We used to keep our inventory in a shed on the café’s outdoor patio.  Today, we are so blessed to be baking in a kitchen with more than 10,000 square feet of space and an oven that fits 30 full sheets of granola at a time!

Most of all we love our days at work.  We feel lucky to have a great supportive team of reps and distributors that believe in our products and work with us to make One Planet Granola a success.

Thank you for being part of our team and granola lover!

Love,

Rana