Good Grain

Rob has finally managed to get his harvest home, far later than he would have liked but at least all his tasty oats, wheat and barley are now carefully stored away for the coming year. I went to see the grain store yesterday and was amazed at the sheer size of the grain mountain. Rob is just relieved to have finally finished driving his combine though there is hardly time for a rest as the ploughing and planting for next year's crop as to be planted right away.

I love the fact that the cereal I held in my hand yesterday may end up in my bowl of muesli very soon. And through meeting Rob and some of our other Conservation Grade farmers I know the sheer effort they put in every single day to grow our grain for me, and lots of other people to eat and enjoy.

Merry Cherries

Our new Limited Edition Frusli bar, Cherry & Cocoa nib has been rolling off the production line this week. The combination of flavours was chosen by Emma Paget who entered our My Frusli competition earlier this year. We wanted to make sure we were asking people what they really wanted when they fancied a cereal bar so My Frusli was a competition where people were asked to design their own flavour of bar. The combination of dark morello cherries and roasted cocoa nib clearly caught the eye of many of those who voted for their favourite flavour and came out as the clear winner.

The cereal bar team have been carefully tasting and testing the recipe ever since and now the bar is ready for you to try. We hope Emma is pleased with the final product and tells all her friends to give her winning bar a try.

How much honey can one person eat?

You can't beat a piece of toast with honey as a midnight snack. Though when I went through my cupboard last night I was slightly disturbed to find a plethora of honey varieties. I clearly have a minor obsession with the sticky stuff. My current favourite was bought on honeymoon in Scotland a few weeks ago, it's just the right consistancy and is really yummy.

Jordans Muesli has landed!

Word on the street is that our new muesli range has been spotted somewhere in a Sainsbury's store in South London. The exact location has not been confirmed so please do keep your eyes and ears open and let us know where you first see those pretty little boxes!

Harvest Time

On Friday I went out to visit Rob Law on his farm nearby. Rob has grown Conservation Grade oats, wheat and barley for us for over twenty years and is a real advocate of 'nature friendly farming'. However, he, like many other farmers in the UK has struggled to get his harvest safely in this year. Thanks to recent lashings of rain vast tracks of the UK's farmland have become very wet and therefore getting the crops in has been a real challenge. Rob was looking forward to finishing his harvest by today, but several weeks behind schedule. He is concerned that the delay will have set back his harvest for next year as he can't plant next years crops until this years were out of the ground.

I showed Rob our new packaging and he seemed to like it, Rob is a fan of our Natural Muesli and as he said; "When I pour my bowl of muesli in the morning I like thinking that some of the grain might have come from the land outside my window."

We think inside the box!

Blogged by Carol:
Last week Ben and I went down to London to see the posters that are going to launch our new muesli range. These posters will be appearing in the car parks of Sainsburys, Tesco, Asda, Waitrose & Morrisons supermarkets during October. You probably can't read the text in the photo but they say 'We think inside the box - it's not just the box we've made tastier" to highlight the new packaging and the new recipes. Later in October there will be magazine adverts too which we'll reveal on the blog soon!

All Hands on Deck!

Tomorrow the whole of Jordans will get together to celebrate the re-launch of our mueslis so today the marketing team spent some time 'team building' as we packed up a goodie bag for all the staff. We can't wait to see the new packs on shelf and see what people really think of them. Anyone who spots the new range and uploads a picture onto our blog will get a free hamper of cereal direct from me...

The Film Crew has landed

Today we began filming a series of short videos for our new website, yes by October we will have an all singing, all dancing new website up and running so watch the http://www.jordanscereals.co.uk/ space. Matthew, Susan and Tony came to talk to our 'Man from Jordans' - John O'Neill about his globe trotting adventures in seach of ingredients for Jordans. Believe it or not hunting the world for the best possible fruit, nuts and seeds is a full time job for John who doesn't really like travelling and would prefer to be at home with his kids than trekking through the jungle looking for Brazil nuts. More films in the offing next week!

Here's a fruity idea

Blogged by: Carol

Today we came across a great idea for an alternative to Country Crisp and milk - why not try Country Crisp and fruit juice? The idea came from Brian in the Tamar Valley on his blog:

http://devonandcornwallviewpoint.blogspot.com/2008/09/not-nostalgic-about-everything.html

The funny thing is that although I must have eaten hundreds of bowls of Country Crisp, I've never tried it with fruit juice! Having now thought about it, I bet Country Crisp would taste great with Smoothie as well. I think we'll start a competition here at Jordans to see who can find the best Country Crisp and fruit juice/smoothie combination - I think Innocent's strawberry & banana smoothie with Country Crisp strawberry is probably a good place to start!

More Emma Bridgewater

Blogged by: Carol

Here's a picture of Emma Bridgewater's shop in Fulham with her latest window display featuring Jordans Frusli! Plus, of course, lots of her lovely designs!

Emma Bridgewater bowls

Blogged by: Carol
To celebrate our muesli makeover, Emma Bridgewater's specially designed bowls are now shown on her website : http://www.emmabridgewater.co.uk/productlist.aspx?cid=NEW&language=en-GB. You can't buy them yet - it's like a pre-sale preview! They will go on sale at the end of September when the new muesli packs hit the supermarket shelves. Anyone who orders a bowl will also get a free sample of our new muesli. As the bowls are a limited edition, there are only 1000 on sale plus we've kept another 1000 for competition prizes that you'll see in the press soon. I've been trying to work out how to get my hands on one of the bowls but Rachel has cleverly hidden them somewhere we can't find them!

Plans for our bee-friendly garden

Blogged by Carol:
Andy the engineer (shown below with the new muesli pack) is a man of many projects and I found out yesterday that he's working on re-designing our car park. This seems like a great opportunity for us to start our own bee-friendly garden. I found a list of lots of different plants that are bee friendly on this website:
http://nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens/list.html
Apparently lavendar and rosemary are a good place to start. So, next steps are to have a look at the plans with Andy and then discuss with John our gardener and hopefully by Christmas we'll have taken the first steps to creating our very own bee garden. More to follow...!

Bee friendly

Blogged by Carol:

Ben, Lee and I finished off the week with a trip down to Buzzworks at Hitchin to hear more about their plans to build a bee-friendly garden and education centre. Because bees are so central to our nature-friendly farming system, we thought we were quite well informed about bees and the current crisis that they are experiencing - but then we met Robin the bee-keeper who kept us enthralled for over an hour teaching us all about bee behaviour (or should that be bee-haviour?!) and bee-keeping. Unfortunately Robin only had one spare suit so Ben & Lee can be seen watching rather nervously from a distance!