Plus, it put me in the kitchen a lot more in order to keep adding inventory. We saw some very good sales days in both venues and that really ate away at our product lines. It was also in late July when we decided to alter the salsa varieties we had been carrying. By referencing the Scoville Heat Chart it made a little more sense to step up our salsas by pepper variety rather than adding more or less of a type or mixing pepper types.
We have a total of seven different ‘heat levels’ in our salsas. We start at our Virgin Salsa which has no heat then move all the way up to our hottest one The Grim Heater which contains Ghost peppers. The idea behind changing the pepper ingredients was to focus on just different levels of heat resulting from the hotter variety of peppers. This allowed us to introduce different peppers into the mix including the Hot Portugal and the Hungarian Hot Wax peppers. The change also produced some really flavourful salsas based on the flavour of the various pepper varieties.
With this goal in mind, we chose to ‘blow out’ the existing salsa inventory. We had a great response to that in the last weekend of July and finished it with another strong day of sales in early August. The momentum that came from that sales event carried us through August with some very good days. Also, we were beginning to see even more repeat customers coming to us – and requesting products by name – at both the Oliver Indoor Flea Market and the OK Falls Community & Farmers Market.
We finished August off with an unusual encounter. Following our last August date in Oliver we drove into Osoyoos on the way home to get a tire looked at that was giving us problems earlier in the day. We ended up bumping into a pair of online friends from the Vancouver area who happened to be camping nearby. George chased them down once I was able to park the car and we ended up serving ‘try-before-you-buy’ taste samples in the parking lot of a downtown business.
The pair, Jason and Mindy, had been followers of JamBusters! for some time but had never had the opportunity to sample our products. They ended up buying items out the back of the car in our makeshift mobile store. It was a fun and interesting way for us to finish off what was quite honestly an amazing month for JamBusters!