Thanksgiving Prep, Product Push & Pre-Holiday Hustle

The Game and the Missed Change

The Hawkeyes game against Michigan State was the kind of win that does not look impressive on paper and feels enormous while it is happening. 20-17 is a score that says both teams were tired and neither would quit, and I will take a win like that in late November every single time. Football in Iowa is not really about the margin, it is about whether your team showed up, and ours did.

The change incident at Colonial Lanes is funny now and was not funny at the time. I gave a customer too much change, realized it about two seconds too late, and spent the rest of the shift doing the mental math on how a busy lane night turns a small error into a real one. The customer was kind about it, which made me feel worse, not better. Counting drawer at the end of the night is a humbling exercise and I needed one.

The bigger news is that a culinary expert came in to prep us for the remodeled kitchen, and I am still processing what that means. A remodel is not just new equipment, it is a different way of working. The flow changes, the timing changes, the things you could do casually become things you have to plan. Getting guidance before we start rather than after is the difference between a kitchen that works and a kitchen that looks good.

Culinary expert came to prep us for opening the remodeled kitchen, and I want to be honest that I did not expect it to matter this much. I thought it would be a walkthrough and a list of expensive equipment we should buy. It was not that.

A Kitchen With a Future

The first thing she told us is that our workflow is backwards. We set the kitchen up so that receiving and shipping happen in the same corner, which means that every delivery and every order crossing creates a collision. On a normal day that is annoying. On the day before Thanksgiving it is the thing that makes the whole operation fall apart.

The second thing is temperature discipline, which we have been treating as a suggestion. She walked us through what actually happens to a tray that sits at room temperature for twenty minutes before it goes in, and it is not a small effect. That twenty minutes is most of our quality problem.

None of this is glamorous and none of it will ever be the subject of a blog post about our journey. But it is the difference between a hobby with a machine in it and an operation, and the fact that we could sit down with somebody who does this professionally and get a straight answer was worth every minute.

Thanksgiving week is the quietest and busiest week of the year at the same time, and I do not have a better way to explain it than that. The phone stops. The orders that are not going to make it by the holiday have already stopped coming in. And simultaneously every single thing we have been building toward all fall is due in the next five days.

The Holiday Hustle Nobody Sees

The calendar is the clearest picture of it. Production has to finish early enough to allow packaging, packaging early enough to allow shipping, and shipping early enough that nothing arrives the week after. Work backward from that and the actual deadline is always further out than it feels.

The other thing I am thankful for is that we got here without faking anything. Every number on the label is a number we measured. Every claim is one I would make in person, in the aisle, holding the bag. I would rather be small and exact than big and approximate.

What I Am Thankful For

The team at Colonial Lanes is the reason the alley held together through a league season that did not slow down for any of this. They covered shifts, they asked how production was going, and not once did anybody ask me to choose between the two. That is rarer than it should be.

I am thankful for Bryon, who took the kids to his parents for the holiday weekend so I could run the alley on the biggest night of the year without checking my phone every ten minutes. He does not make a production of it. He just does it, and then he asks how the shift went like he actually wants to know.

The remodel itself belongs on this list, which is strange to say about a construction project. But a kitchen that works is not a small thing when your whole week depends on it. The counter space, the working flow, the fact that the sink drains in under a minute instead of three — none of it is glamorous and all of it shows up in every batch.

Mostly I am thankful that we got here without faking anything. Every number on the label is a number we measured. Every claim is one I would make in person, in the aisle, holding the bag. I would rather be small and exact than big and approximate, and this year gave us the chance to prove that was the right call.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC