It's been a very very busy 10 days since we came back from Bloom. This weekend was a lovely one. I was up in University College Galway on Saturday speaking to the participants of the Masters in Agricultural Innovation and they gave me an absolutely fantastic Velvet Cloud cake as thank you . First time somebody's made us a cake with the Velvet Cloud logo, which was really lovely.
On Sunday the Canadian Prime Minister had a civic reception in Westport and he was served canapés of Velvet Cloud Live Yogurt and Cloonbook Cheese so that was a great one for us and for lots of other Mayo food producers.
Earlier on in the week I posted a video on social media in support of another small Irish food producer called the Merry Mill. They produce organic gluten-free oats and they've been asked to take the phrase "gut health" off their packaging. I just saw red because a similar situation had happened to us several years ago. We had "digestion friendly" on our packaging and we had to remove it. As a small producer, when you have to change your packaging on yoghurt pots, it costs you several hundred euro because you have to change the artwork and the printing plates. The regulations are quite complicated and difficult to understand because when we go into the yoghurt aisle in the supermarket, we see a lot of competing international brands with statements like "gut health", "gut health bacteria", "probiotic dailies", etc. But apparently there's a very distinct difference between making a health claim and making a statement? I think the issue probably is that these large multinational brands have very good legal teams and very good marketing teams and us smallies are under-resourced so we don't know how to take advantage like the bigger guys do. Anyway the post exploded and everybody and his wife is commenting, from conspiracy theorists saying that the Irish government wants to close all the small companies down, (which I totally disagree with) to lovely people just sympathizing with us and sharing and posting.
Finally there was a lovely review in the Sunday Business Post by Gillian Neils of Coppinger Restaurant in which they had a delicious “Velvet Cloud Sorbet” to finish. So this week I am looking forward to a few days of non events, if thaty is possible. :) Enjoy your week, Aisling
