Especially as the holidays come upon us, candy makers are busy. That’s why this week’s tip helps you manage your time and maintain the quality of your candies.

 

This past year, we had a Good Manufacturing Practices series in Kettle Talk, our quarterly newsletter magazine for RCI members. The most recent article included a great tip for quality control we just had to share:

 

 

It’s brilliant, right? Now when you start a batch of caramel and walk away to work on packaging, you’ll be alerted to the candy cooking process with enough time to remove it or begin the next step before it gets even one degree too high.

 

Looking for suppliers of thermometers with an alarm? RCI members can access RCI Buyer’s Guide on the member side of the website or call the RCI office to be connected to a supplier.

 

The typical corporate email user sends and receives about 105 email messages per day. So, today we’re going to give a great tip to help organize your inbox: categorize by color-coding!

 

Categorizing your inbox may take a few different forms, depending on the email provider you use. We’ll focus on Microsoft Outlook since that is the most popular email provider for the corporate user but we’ve provided some links at the end of this post to help organize your inbox if you use Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo!.

 

Assigning a color category to your email messages will allow you to easily identify and organize emails. Additionally, the color categories you create are available for other items in Outlook such as notes, contacts and appointments. To define your categories, click on the ‘Categories’ button next to ‘Forward’ and then click on ‘All Categories’. From here you can name the category associated with the colors you wish to use. 

 

Once your color-coded categories are defined, you are ready to assign categories to your Outlook items. Just right-click on the email message, task or calendar item and then click on ‘Categorize’ and select a category. You’ll see small colored-box show up on the message or task and the item will completely change colors in the calendar.

 

One of the great features is that you can sort items by category. So, if you want to see the emails just related to wholesaling, it’s just a few clicks away. Additionally, items in your Outlook may be assigned to more than one category. For example, an email message may be assigned to the categories Supplies, Wholesale and Marketing.

 

Once you begin color-coding your emails, you’ll wonder how you lived without this great tip! If you have other tips and ideas for organizing emails, please share them in the comments below!

 

Looking to organize emails in Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail? Check out these links!

 

Has one of your Facebook strategies for your business been to grow sales? If so, we hope these tips help you meet that goal!

 

For holidays or even just fun days, post specials with fun keywords that fans can redeem in your store. For example, for Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19, promote sales by creating a special they’ll receive in store if they use the words “Arrrrgh” or “Ahoy” in a sentence. Then, only promote this special on Facebook to draw your fans into your store. Be sure to specify any limits, etc. associated with the special.

How many Facebook likes do you have? If you’re aiming for a certain goal number, let your fans know and encourage them to invite their friends to like your Facebook page. You could even provide a coupon prize for the xx^th like along with the person who invited them to like your page. By increasing your likes you will be expanding your reach and with the coupon you will be drawing them into your store.

As chocolate and candy makers, you have a great opportunity to entice appetites for your treats by using images. Research has confirmed that food images can stimulate the “crave” part of the brain which could entice them to visit your store (in person or online) to purchase your products. Take advantage of this by posting beautiful pictures of your products to remind your fans why they should visit your store. Pay attention to the quality of your photos before posting them – if you don’t think they look beautiful and enticing, your potential customers probably won’t think so either and won’t be encouraged to pay your store a visit.   If you need high quality photos, consider asking your suppliers if they have product photos you can use to promote sales in your store. 

 

If you have more tips to increase sales, please share them with our blog community and post them below!

 

Are you paying attention to Yelp.com? Do you even know what it is? Yelp.com is a user review and local search website.  From their website FAQ’s: “Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what's great — and not so great — in your world.”  What does this mean for your business? When customers enjoy or don’t enjoy your products and/or services, they are using yelp.com to share it with the world. Not only do they give a rating but they also write detailed reviews, covering both the good and the bad. And guess what? When a potential customer is considering visiting your store, there is a pretty high chance they are visiting the Yelp website first to see what other people are saying about it.

 

So what do you do about all of this? We have a few points on how to use this review site to your advantage:

 

Now what are you waiting for? Go find out what people are saying about your company. We hope you find good things and take any not-so-good things into consideration to make your business even better.

We’re busy planning and preparing for our upcoming Annual Convention and Industry Expo in San Francisco, June 11 through 15. This week’s tip is to join us there!

 

What can you expect at an RCI Annual Convention?

Industry Tradeshow – Meet face to face with confectionery industry suppliers and learn about the new and innovative products on the market. The tradeshow is FREE to confectionery industry professionals so print your free tradeshow ticket (insert link) and make plans to join us!

Networking – Connect with others in the industry throughout the week through a variety of networking opportunities. New this year, we have an evening set aside just for the next generation of industry leaders.

Education – We are excited to have education session topics including packaging, natural products, HACCP planning plus more. Additionally, we have a great idea-sharing session for RCI members called Candy Clinic and a question and answer session with a panel of industry experts.

Behind-the-scenes Tours – The last two days of the convention are filled with tours of area candy stores and suppliers. You’ll want to have a notebook in had because the ideas you can take back to your stores are endless.

 

For all the details and to register, visit retailconfectioners.org/annual. The early-bird discount ends May 11, so register today!