Review Coming Soon!

Review Coming This Week! 11/6/11

Mr. Cola Review

Even with the internet and a phone to help gain insight on Mr. Cola’s origins, its conception still has a shroud of mystery. Mr. Cola’s straight forward, black and white label clearly states “since 1949” but has been through the hands of at least two manufacturers within its 62 year history. Grapette (Grapette has since been bought up by Walmart) owned and produced Mr. Cola from 1962 and discontinued production in 1970. More than ten years would pass before the Orca Bottling Company of Washington State, introduced its first beverages to the market. Orca bought a Pepsi bottling plant that had been flooded and subsequently was written off Pepsi’s insurance company in the early 80’s and with this stroke of luck was able to buy defunct formulas and contract with other soda producers to develop a full line and thus Mr. Cola found its way back to the market shelves.

The basic black and white packaging and the heavy caramel color seems straight forward with some possible aesthetic appeal to the hipster community. The flavor has a light, sugar cane base sweetness with slight bite of phosphoric acid. The aftertaste almost reminds me of a slight artificially sweetener taste that you would expect from a diet soda. This aftertaste although light, would sway me toward another cola on my next purchase. Also I understand that Mr. Cola’s style is that of a minimalistic, James Dean cool, with basic black and white paper label, but with the quality of the pop being in question, I’m left to wonder if Orca should put more thought into bettering a brand that’s been discontinued at least once before.

The Orca Bottling Company’s story and its website offers inspiration to all those whom dream of owning a legitimate business and with a handful of soda’s that are relatively good (dad’s root beer and Sioux City Birch Beer) I believe that Orca should Either redesign or retire Mr. Cola.

4 Bottles out of 10

Boylan Cane Cola Review

With Coca-Cola and Pepsi dominating the soda market and creating in essence an iron curtain to prevent other bottling companies to enter into the mainstream, it’s safe to say that a majority of the consumer population has never heard of Boylan Bottling Company. But Boylan, a family owned company founded in 1891, is in many ways the perfect underdog that American’s would love to root for and has the potential to wow the soda consumer market with its gourmet flavors and high quality ingredients delivered within a glass bottle with Boylans’ neat logo, done in ceramic paint, on front.

Boylan currently produces 21 unique blends, all made with sugar cane, including Boylan’s entry into the cola market, Cane Cola. Cane Cola is considered a turn of the century cola due to its toned down sweetness and acidic flavor. Upon first opening the bottle I found just enough carbonation to tell me that it was fresh. On first taste, the soda was smooth without the sharp kick that you expect from the other cola big shots. Cane Cola resembles Pepsi Throw Back in comparison to sweetness and acidic kick but had a short after taste, probably derived from the sugar cane, of a light sugar sweetened water.


Throw in the nicely designed glass bottle and I would prefer this cola over the major two’s anytime. In fact Red Rock Cola is the only cola that I would choose over Boylan’s Cane Cola.      

8.5 bottles out of 10

Upgrading our packaging and storage area September 2011

One of the most important factors that affects time consumption, quality of goods and services, work performance, and a slew of other aspects of a successful business is your storage and packaging area. As a small start up company we first used simple plastic shelving units to store the few hundred products we had. This was a basic starting point with the intent to continue to approve and upgrade the system to match and exceed our growth. The plastic shelves met our need for being cost effective at the time and allowed us to have a general area to locate our cache of goods but at the same time hampered our ability to stay organized and in control of the inventory. I can't even imagine how much time is lost and stressed gained from the low quality and layout of facilities.

The recession can be a blessing to small portions of the population that have the extra funds and an open eye for deals. Our first up grade for packaging and storage started as a stop at a going out of business clearance sale at a local movie rental store. most of the movies had been picked over with few appeasing titles remaining, I remember one movie left on the shelf for sale being a 2006 National Spelling Bee documentary. Just beyond these slim pickings though there was another product of interest, the grid wall and fixtures that the stores products sat on. After talking to the stores manager we negotiated a price somewhere around 200 dollars for near 600 sq ft. of grid wall, a few hundred shelves that attach to them and a few wheel carts. If bought new I'd estimate the cost to be over a grand. Our idea was to hold on to these fixtures and use them to set up for a store front or fair in the future if the opportunity presented itself to us and until the latest upgrade this grid wall was used as our inventory storage. The grid wall gave us better organization and cut down the time it took to locate our signs but unfortunately was somewhat bulky and limited on the number of signs it could hold.

We decided to increase our sign inventory from 150 signs to near 600 by mid September and to a goal of at least 1500 signs by new years 2012. With this increase we knew we would need to implement a better strategy to control the influx of product. The answer was Marks's brain child, a custom made shelving unit that would vertically stack our signs in 15-20 item groups with each row having 18 removable shelves. This expandable shelving system will be able to accommodate the 1500+ signs and will be the premises for our inventory storage as Gifts and Games grows from an at home business module into a larger scaled warehouse location.

We had been using various spots in Mark and Kari's house for our packaging and storage needs. The dining room table worked well as a sorting station as well as an incoming/outgoing spot, Mark and Kari's pool table in their basement started as the packaging area, and the home office space was used for printing shipping labels and working on eBay. Mark decided to consolidate all of these functions into one streamlined station utilizing a converted 8' x 12' coal room in the basement. The room was recently a loft room that had been supped up with a nice coat of paint and a new set of lighting fixtures.

The first set of runners

Humble Beginnings

Welcome to The Business From Scratch Recipe Blog. A running diary of our ventures as Gifts and Games, a small business start up out of Dayton, Ohio. Mark, Kari and I, just like many of you, have the aspirations to utilize our full creative abilities, have better control over our schedules and finances and simply to live a life with its full potential.

Gifts and Games officially got it's upstart in March of 2011 by applying for and receiving our federal tax i.d. number and Ohio vendors license (we will blog about this process, fees and laws within the next few weeks). Mark and I had roughly 150 tin signs and other inventory from a previous endeavor with local summer fairs 3 years prior and decided to use eBay to sale our products to build our bank account over the course of the next few years. Our plans are to increase our inventory from a few hundred items to well up into the thousands while expanding from online sales of signs, arcade games and candy into a brick and mortar chain and warehouse/distributor.

We plan on sharing a great amount of our experiences and found knowledge within this blog to help create an outline to potentially help others cut through some of the weeds that may tangle their paths on the way to their dreams. Fill free to converse and give to this collective some of the knowledge or questions you may have!

Chad - Gifts and Games