Hello readers.   Its been a rollercoaster ride here at DD HQ for the past 6 weeks since we returned from The Fine Food Show at London Olympia.     Our focus and attention has been on following up the leads from the show and launching the new company:  The Handmade Cheesecake Company.  More on that later.

I am delighted to announce that we have now shipped our first orders from the Olympia show....hard work and effort and huge thanks to our team ( hope you are all reading this lol )

I am happy to say that our business goes from strength to strength with another new wholesaler on board and more in the pipeline.  Also in the pipeline are new premises.  Still working on the finer detail and will update in due course.

The Handmade Cheesecake Company....

The website will go live by 29th October and will feature a range of our wonderful tantalising cheesecakes, desserts and cakes.   We can offer delivery to many locations across Scotland to the towns and villages which we already deliver to via The Dessert Depot and off course you can also collect from our premises.   We are very very excited and busy marketing and advertising with adverts running in various local publications and on facebook.  We know we are good at making cheesecakes -we sell countless amounts every week to our loyal customers some of whom have been buying them for 9 years! and we win awards.

We are passionate about what we do and innovative and imaginative ideas are flowing with many NPD ideas in the pipeline and of course we are also excited about our range of wedding cheesecakes for which we have already received an inquiry via our facebook page!   We plan to launch them fully in January when we exhibit at the Ayrshire Wedding Exhibition.

In the meantime please go to our website and enter our free competition to win £150 worth of gift vouchers to spend on our delicious selection of products. You can also download our festive dessert list and call us with your order or wait until the website goes live and place your order online :)

Further updates will be forthcoming !

The exhibition at London Olympia was a resounding success. The team at The Dessert Depot spent three days there with a wonderful array of our products which were very well received and we got some really good quality inquires. We have a new poster girl she is holding a Strawberry Meringue cake which is pre-portioned into 14. Her name is Janey and she is the daughter of Frances our MD.  We will soon be offering portioning as an option to all our customers( October )

On Tuesday 6th Sept we had the Olympic Buying team on our stand and they loved the Apricot & Almond Crunch and the Ginger Hedgehog.  Waiting to hear back on that one.  We also had a husband and wife team Paul and Cathy who will be be ordering bulk traybakes to sell across the South of England - we are well down the road with that one. The work does not stop when the three day show ends as every exhibitor knows the coming weeks and months are spent following up inquiries. From the last show we did in January in Glasgow we had an astounding amount of new business and with the level of inquries we have from the London Show we are more than a little optimistic.

Very busy working on the launch of the new website The Handmade Cheesecake Company.  Check our facebook page here for the new company, its also a work in progress plus  you can also follow us on twitter.

We had a meeting very recently with a potential customer from Liverpool who would like to distribute our products and he said our cheesecakes and cakes had the WOW factor.  He was also well impressed with our the rest of our range of products. More to come on this one, wont reveal who he or his company is but it has the potential to be a  BIG slice of business for us :-). Bring it on :-) 

This year so far has been an eventful one. In February we lost one of our biggest customers.  What a blessing in disguise. We are happy to say that we are delighted to be no longer dealing with them. Yes I said delighted.  LOL. We have turned the loss into an opportunity and have never looked back and continue to go from strength to strength with an ever evolving and innovative range of products and new customers plus an exciting new company in the offing. A big thank you to all our customers new and old.   

The up and coming SALSA audit is also on our mind, this will be our 5th audit and we are well prepared for it, the audit takes place on 6th October.

Thats it for now, I'm finishing this whilst watching the memorial service for the victims of 9/11. Our thoughts go out to the families, friends and collegues of all the victims.

Had a great few days at Ayr Flower Show last weekend 5th, 6th, 7th August.  We were invited by South Ayrshire Council to take a stand in the Food Colonnade.  We shared the stand with Renaldos Ice Cream and handmade chocolates on one side....very very yummy chocolates, and on our other side Woodlands farm who where promoting their beautiful hotel and selling the best strawberries we have every tasted.   Also on the stand were Pollok Williamson butchers from Ayr ( great Haggis !) and Ayr Brewing Company.   All very nice people.  It was great to meet you all.

Friday at the show was a beautiful sunny day and the crowds were out in force.  Saturday it rained as it did on Sunday but it was still very busy and we managed to shift all our products which we had made specially for the show.  We had 6 varieties of sponge cakes, 8 varieties of Traybakes and loads of samples.   At 3.30pm on Sunday we had one sponge cake left and a handful of traybake squares.  Must admit to having rather a sore throat as I was using my vocal cords to draw attention to our delcious handmade cakes to the passing throngs of people.  It worked.   My apologies to the other stand members if my fog horn voice grated on your eardrums :-) but I am know we entertained you with our tart talk ;-)

Next exhibition for us will be The Speciallity Fine Food Show in a few weeks time in London,  hope the riots are under control by then as its pretty horrific whats happening there right now. 

Plans for our new retail website and factory shop are well underway. The website will feature pictures of our new products as well as ordering advice. Basically you can place your order online, pay for it and collect it.  Our factory shop will be open on Saturday mornings from 8am to 1pm for collection of pre-ordered cakes and cheesecakes plus we will also have a selction of products on sale in the shop.  Initially the website will only be able to take orders from people who are able to collect ( Ayrshire ) but we plan to roll it out to a wider geography next year and people can order and have their selection delivered by courier.  We are very excited and our range of cheesecakes will include such tasty treats as Honeycomb blast,  Citrus layer, Double Chocolate Truffle, Strawberrys blast, all can be personalised for any occasion. The website address is: www.handmadecheesecakes.co.uk - check back soon as it is not yet live.  Lots going on and need an extra day in the week to cope with it all!

Would like to thank all our customers for their continued support.  We have some very loyal and long standing customers and this year we have also had an unprecedented number of new customers.  Thank you! 

Please follow us on Facebook and twitter for regular updates.

Last blog posting was 22nd May!  Apologies.  June and July are mayhem months at the Dessert Depot, and sadly the blog has been neglected a wee bit.   Some companies actually pay people to keep their blog, facebook page, twitter and newsletters updated but we are not one of them :-)  being a SME of the micro variety we tend to multi task and the multi tasking in this case falls to me.  So I am taking 5 mins from the HECTIC schedule to update the blog. 

At the beginning of July we launched another 5 new products.   We have 3 new cheesecakes:  Eastern Promise, Butterscotch Bonanza and Chocorange.   Our 2 new cakes are OGM! Choca Mocha triple layer cake and Very Lemon and Raspberry.  

Really happy to announce that all are selling well and 4 out of the 5 will soon be available from JB Foods in Edinburgh who are a quality foodservice company with a great range of products. Very exciting for us to have a wholesaler the caliber of JB foods who distribute widley across Scotland to a range of hotels, coffee shops and restaurants.  In addition to these 4 products JB will also wholesale the following 6 products:

1. Our award winning Strawberry and White Chocolate Cheesecake

2. White Chocolate and Coconut Explosion Cake

3. Strawberry Meringue Cake

4. White Fudge Avalanche Cake 

5. Cinder Toffee Crunch Cake

6. Cranberry and White Chocolate Cheesecake

We also have 2 new traybakes in the works and roadtasting will commence early August.    Apricot and Almond and Raspberry and White Chocolate..YUM.

2 weeks ago ( wk2July ) we had a manufacturing review with SMAS ( Scottish Manufacturing Advisory Service).  SMAS provide help and support to Scottish Manufacturing companies across all sectors.    We are working with them to identify areas of improvement within our process which will lead to improved working practices and efficiencies and leaner manufacturing.  In addition we also had an independent audit of our Quality Management and HACCP procedures last week ( WK3 July ) and we are busy updating and reviewing our quality manual in preperation for our anual SALSA audit in October/November.

The other piece of news we have is that we are developing a range of funky cheesecakes and cakes for sale direct to the public.    Initially we are setting up a " factory shop"  which will be open on a Saturday morning for our customers to collect their goodies which will be available for order and collection only at this stage.  The range of products will be different to those offered to our trade customers and will be smaller size although customers will have the option to go large by request.  Part of the range will be celebration cheesecakes with the option having them personalised and gift wrapped.   We are very excited about it.  The range is under development right now and will be lauched during September - intially locally around Ayrshire then rolled out via the website to other geographic locations.  We will be using various mediums to market the products including local advertising and flyers.  More to follow.

As if that was not enough we also upgraded our accounting software last week, so multi tasking is being taken to new levels....lol.

The countdown is on to the Speciality Fine Food exhibition in London on 4/5/6th September where we are exhibiting as part of the Scottish Food and Drink pavilion. But before that you can see us at the Ayr Flower Show where we will be part of the Food Colannade. There are not enough hours in the day or enough days in the week right now.  Would not change it for anything as we continue to grow our business with new customers almost daily.