In Search of the Other America

Part 2 of the Tourist 2 Townie Interview of the Cookie King

A couple of days ago Tourist 2 Townie posted part 1 of an interview with yours truly. Here is part 2.

In this one we talk about school for the little ones; literacy initiatives; John Cusack; Vin Diesel; having milk and cookies with President Obama and some of my hidden gems and pet peeves of Buenos Aires.

If you are curious I can expand on the things that I like about Argentina.

And yes, those ears are natural!

Tourist 2 Townie Interviews The Cookie King

I honestly really dislike watching myself on T.V.

I apologize beforehand for all the "ums" and "ands". I have to work on that especially if I am on one of The Best Latin American Travel Blogs for crying out loud!

I know I can get it right and I have done an Interview on T.V. before that came out really well with very few of those nervous ticks.

Gareth, if you ever interview me again, I promise to be better.

Here is Part 1 of Gareth´s interview.

Entrepreneur Invasion

I was interviewed a while back and I just found out about the article in Apertura magazine being on-line. Actually, the article mentions a whole bunch of fellow expat entrepreneurs:

Martin Frankel with Areatres, Sugar Bar and Expat-Connection.
Micheal Evans with Vines of Mendoza.
Jordan Metzner and Sam Nadler with California Burrito Company.
Micheal Legge with Natural Deli
Rémi Noiriel with Jacarandá Films
Nigel Tollerman with 0800 Vinos
Daniel Rosenber & Liran Jakob with Minihostels
Maria Macdonald with Yoquevos.com
Jed Rothenberg with LandingPadBA.com

This happens to be a partial list by the way. Any other expat entrepreneur out there that would like to chime in and let us know of your businesses go ahead and let us know about you in the comments.

Clarin´s Top 10 - Sugar & Spice Makes the List

Not a bad way to end the year or start a new one. Clarin, Argentina´s largest newspaper, included us in their round-up of entrepreneurs with the most innovative ideas. For some reason, the online article is not complete so you would have to read the actual paper or you can click on the picture above if you can read Spanish.

Another expat (this one from the UK) was also mentioned. His company is 0800-Vino and it is a wine delivery service that promises to have your order delivered to your home within the hour.

Clarin chose among all the companies that they interviewed during the year. This was a complete surprise to me, and I found out about it after a friend of mine wrote to me congratulating me on the article. Thanks Tom!

The article is in Spanish, so what follows is my own personal translation of our part of the article.

Frank Almeida said that he came to this country out of love. He arrived in 1999 with his then girlfriend, now wife, but he soon started to miss some things. "I could not find cookies, like I knew cookies". To satisfy his nostalgia, his wife started baking out of their home. Today they are the owners of Sugar & Spice, a brand of gourmet cookies that invoiced $1,500,000 pesos in 2007.

We first "baked them at home and sold them to local bars and cafés of Palermo Viejo". Later they rented a space, bought an oven and designed their packaging. They managed to sell to Falabella (multinational departement store chain) and that is how they started their relationships with large clients. They also obtained angel investment to the tune of one million dollars. With that money they bought a factory with 800 sq meters of space. Today you can find their products in Jumbo, Disco, Libertad and La Anonima.

Of course we can also be found in many small gourmet shops, cafés, wine shops, cheese shops, video stores, chocolate shops, etc throughout the country from Tierra del Fuego to Misiones.

Radio Reminder - La Isla

I will be on the radio today at noon. The show is called "La Visión" (The Vision) and I will be interviewed by Carlos Clerici and Alejandra Zuccoli.

La Isla 89.9 FM - La Vision


********castellano*******

Me van a entrevistar hoy a las doce del mediodía en el programa "La Visión" de Carlos Clerici y Alejandra Zuccoli en La Isla 89.9 FM.

Podcast Reminder - The Socially Responsible Cookie

Patt Gilmore stopped by the store last week and we had a chat over coffee and cookies. She surprised me by putting the interview up right away. If you would like to hear it you can click here.

Her site is called What´s the Frequency Argentina?

While you visit her site you can also listen to her other recent interviews covering ice cream, grilling meat, etc. She also has an audio book called Squatting Over a Bucket Under the Argentine Moon.

If you have iTunes you can also look up her podcast and listen to it on your iPod.

You are sure to find something to interest you at her site.

Oh, that non-profit that I could not remember during the interview is CCRAI.

Radio Reminder - Pan Dulce (Panettone)

Mañana me van a entrevistar en la radio en el programa de Adalberto Rossi "Cátedra
Avícola y Agropecuaria" am750 entre las 7 y 8 horas de la mañana. El tema sera sobre el Pan Dulce.

Obviamente voy a hablar sobre el Pan Dulce de Tus Sueños.

********English*********

I am going to be on the radio again. What, you haven´t heard me on the radio?

I can´t blame you. I haven´t mentioned it before. I have been pretty bad about that so from now on I am going to try to let everyone in on those little events before hand.

Tomorrow, between 7am and 8am Argentina time, I will be interviewed on a show called "Cátedra
Avícola y Agropecuaria" on am750. The topic is going to be Pan Dulce (Panettone).

Obviously I am going to talk about the Panettone of Your Dreams.

Argentina´s Best Kept Secret?

I have long felt like my company was one of those best kept secrets out there.

The people that I would go and pitch my product to didn´t know who I was, they never saw my product, they weren´t sure if they could sell it.

The people I would sell to during the holiday fairs had never heard of us, and would not know where to buy our cookies.

The magazine people would often offer us publicity in exchange for cookies. That´s right, I now have an alternative currency.

The TV people would offer me interviews in exchange for money. Yep, I could buy airtime. I tried to tell them that since no one knew who we were, we really could not afford buying air time by the minute.

All of that has slowly, but steadily changed.

I now have little time to go out and look for clients, they are calling me.

I am so busy that I can no longer participate in fairs or expos.

Magazines and Newspapers are calling us for interviews and a couple of TV shows have jumped on the bandwagon as well, and they are not charging me anymore.

I had my first foreign based interview. John Bell from Digital Influence Mapping Project was in town and he was wondering if it was "easier for small businesses to "get" social media?". Here is an article in Apertura (in Spanish) that weighs in with more evidence to the affirmative to his question.

However, I have not had any luck with any of the foreign media that have been lurking along the cobblestone streets of my Palermo Viejo.

This past Sunday an article was published in Clarin, Argentina´s largest newspaper. The article itself will take a while to go on-line. I was also asked three questions by Apertura. This last one will be in print only.

I also have an interview on the radio scheduled for this Saturday morning. The station is called Radio America. The show is called "El Emprendedor Urbano" / "The Urban Entrepreneur", and it will air from 11am to 12pm. No, I am sure my segment will not be an hour long, more like 5 or 10 minutes most likely. They tell me that this is a brand new show so it doesn´t show up on their line-up yet.

Meanwhile, our humble little store chugs merrily along. It´s very quite and does not see a lot of action. However, every month it manages to sell a little more. This is how I am gauging that we are still a secret in Buenos Aires. In fact, the editor of Time Out Buenos Aires did not even know about us. She has not set foot in our little store... yet. If there is anyone out there that should know about us it should be them.

Now that they do know about us and they are visiting us, together with Clarin´s article, I am beginning to feel nostalgic for that time when we were still underneath the radar. At least, for the foreign media we still are Argentina´s best kept secret.

Road Show talks to Sugar & Spice

The Road Show is a weekly television magazine news format that runs for 30 minutes. Within those 30 minutes they gave me about 9 minutes. This is the excerpt on Sugar & Spice.

Can you tell I was a little bit nervous? I have been on TV before, but that was at my own shop and it was much shorter, and unfortunately the link to the video itself is no longer there.

Anyway, if you understand Spanish you can view the interview below.

Minuto Uno / One Minute

Another interview done, but talk about fast. I was pleasantly surprised when we got a call at the store and the person tells us that she called after reading this story to find out where she could go to buy some of our cookies.

What´s more, you can leave comments at the end of the articles in this news site and when I looked we had received a nice comment as well.

The site is called MinutoUno and it is in Spanish obviously.

Click -here- to go directly to the article.

Interviewed by Negocios y Pymes

I know I am a bit late with this, but I was featured in an on-line article and I am also going to be on TV again. I don't have the date for that very short television appearance, but if you can read Spanish you can read the article.

Interview with Negocios y Pymes

By the way, PYMES stands for small and medium sized businesses.

Espacios TV Interview

A while back I was interviewed for a cable TV Show called "espacios TV"and I wrote about it. The video is out now and you can see it on their website.

The interview was done by Sofia Alurralde and I get another excuse to, yet again, put a pretty face on my blog.

When you go there you click on the little TV.

A little window will pop up within the site and the first show that pops up is show 121. It will start streaming and you can watch as it plays out.

You will see a report on a fashion show first and then the report on us starts.

Happy watching.

Espacios TV

Espacios TV is a weekly show produced from Tucuman. The show spotlights design, fashion, art, tourism, architecture, and "vida sana" (healthy living). Half of the show´s content has to do with Buenos Aires and the rest with Tucuman. If you go to the sight you can click on the little orange TV and you can view a clip of the show. It loads pretty quickly. I have Fibertel cable modem so nothing too fancy under the hood here.

Our PR agency, Flavia Tomaello, organized an interview on this show. I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Sofia Alurralde. I say pleasure becuase not only is it obvious that she is very pretty but she was also very nice and sweet. In fact, she is even prettier in person than in these pictures and I imagine she looks pretty good on TV.

So if you happen to be anywhere near Tucuman and have access to a Television you can check out the show.

It runs on Tuesdays at 11pm and then repeats Wednesday at 1pm; Thursday at 8pm; Friday at 8:30pm; Saturday at 11:30am and 8:30pm; Monday at 6:30pm

They are going to send me a CD of the show so if I can figure out how to load video on to the blog I will post it.

Radio Provincia de Buenos Aires

This time we are going to be on Radio Provincia on their show titled "Economia Real" (Real Economy). The frequency is AM1270 and if you would like to listen to it on your computer you can go -here-.

Unfortunately this was a taped interview and they did not tell me when it was going to air. Apparently the Radio Jockey Horacio Sola tapes his interviews and sends them to the radio. They put the tape in and play his show. For this interview they called me and it was conducted via the telephone.

The show runs every Sunday from 6am to 7am. I am pretty sure that I won´t have any of my friends from the USA listening at that time (Chicago time 4am to 5am) and not too many in Argentina for that matter since I can´t imagine anyone waking up at 6am on Sunday just to listen to me except for me, and that is only since I am up anyway at that time. I am going to see if I can tape it and somehow put it up somewhere.

This time they had me talking quite a bit. It was a little bit longer than the Radio Palermo interview.

Radio Palermo 94.7

Yesterday Sugar & Spice appeared in La Nacion and today we are going to be on the Radio. I have been invited to appear on a radio program called Compartiendo. You can hear it at 8pm on 94.7 Radio Palermo.

This is a radio station that is based in Palermo Hollywood. If you are curious give it a listen.

La Nación Interview II

Today the interview came out in La Nación. It is in the Economic section under Emprendedores. I wrote about it previously -here- and you can go to that previous post to see how it compares to what actually came out.

One glaring but minor error is that I am not from Washington. I am from Chicago. Go BULLS!

Here is the link to the article:
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/906381

La Nación Interview

I was just interviewed by Mercedes Garcia, a reporter from La Nación. I have done interviews in the past and haven’t really been too happy with them. However, she was great. She was friendly, asked questions and kept the conversation flowing smoothly. It was more like talking to a friend who was really interested in what I was doing.

Anyway, I would like to sum up what was covered and it will be interesting to see how much of that gets through or how it gets translated. Click -here- for the post on the actual interview that came out.

Company Beginnings:
My wife and I studied different gourmet food opportunities for export. We visited the USA, Canada, and the UK. We went on guided supermarket and gourmet store tours and talked to importers and distributors. We noticed that in each of these markets there existed clearly defined nitch markets for gourmet foods like coffee, tea, ice cream, spreads, olive oil, pastas, chocolate and cookies and breads.

These nitch markets have been growing in Argentina as well. Locally you have gourmet coffee, tea, oils, spreads, and alfajores. However, there are no gourmet cookies. I mean you have bakeries that offer fresh baked goods but no one had a gourmet shelf stable cookies. Based on this market study we decided to focus on cookies and breads.

We came up with an initial product line-up that included Cookies, Biscotti, Cantucci and Brownies. We used the local bars as guinea pigs (local market study) and get quick direct feedback from them. People loved the cookies. Demand started increasing and we looked for investors, rented our first facility and started growing even faster.

We now distribute our cookies nationwide to the most select delicatessens, wine shops, department stores, virtual supermarkets, gift shops, and duty free shops. We also offer private label and bulk customers like Aroma Café, Freddo, Munchie´s, McCafé, and The Coffee Store.

We moved into our new and current location during November of 2006 and we opened our new store in December of 2006. Our new facility is 600 sq meters and is a state of the art baking facility. This has given us the ability and confidence to start looking past Argentina’s borders for new clients in other countries.

The interview is supposed to come out in Monday´s section titled Emprendedores.