Thursday, December 27, 2007

Holiday Mayhem

We are right at the start of our peak holiday season. It seems like half of Melbourne comes down to Phillip Island for the Christmas/January holidays - which is great for all the tourist traps but is a pain for a business like ours.
We can only sell the eggs that the hens lay. We can't make any more! And we can't cater for a short term demand of four to six weeks because what do we do with the eggs when the terrorists (sorry tourists) go home?
We try to assist our regulars and our priority is always for our home delivery customers and the restaurants/hotels/stores which buy our eggs all year. But it can be hard when a regular rings up on delivery day to double (or even treble) the order. With a bit of time we can accommodate most requests by shuffling deliveries.
We have a normal operating target of around 400 dozen eggs each week, and we lift that to around 450 -500 dozen at this time of year. We supplement that by buying-in eggs from other accredited free range farms (we only get other eggs from two trusted farms). But even then we are always short of the 1000 to 1500 dozen eggs we need for these few weeks every year.
In a way it's a great position to be in. However I wish that some 0f our restaurant clients realised that we can't conjure up eggs with a few hours notice. If they give us a week's notice we can give them the world.
Glad I got that off my chest!!