paulpigott

Is there any possibility of a bacon cracker? ← Wow, that does sound good, I must say. Thanks for the suggestion, and I wish we had time to act on it. We have been preparing for the past few months to launch 3 new spicy flavors in January: Chipotle, Red Chile, and Serrano/Lime. They all have a couple of other seasonings as well. It's the same cracker, but in a smaller size, about 3"X4", rather than the usual 4"X7". The bags will be 4 oz rather than 8 oz. too, so the price point in the retail stores should be budget friendly (though, as mentioned above, we don't control that!). It will be a fun cracker with some heat, a real departure from our other flavors. Hope people like 'em! Thanks again for the suggestion about the bacon flavor.

The crackers have at least a 6 month shelf life since we upgraded our packaging last summer. We have confirmed the extended shelf life with a third party testing company, but just to be doubly sure we have continued to print the date showing only a 4 months expiration, and will do so until the first of next year. That will put us out around 8 months. So the crackers should taste just fine if you want to check them out. Maybe you can ask for a further discount since they are past the expiration date.

Katie, thanks for your kind words. I don't think you are being picky at all by looking for the lighter croccantini! We have many customers who like them exactly the way you do, and have others who prefer them mostly dark. Nothing wrong with either, it's just a matter of taste. We try to navigate down the middle by baking them with some light browning of the bubbles on top, and a whiter color for the rest of the cracker. Usually we do OK in that regard. But, our dough preparation process has some steps that are somewhat unusual, and for reasons we don't fully understand (even after 10 years of making the cracker) it creates inconsistencies in the bake, including big swings in the color. I liken it to herding cats. You think things are under control for a moment, and then the cats take off in all directions and show you who's really boss! BTW, we are exploring the concept of adding a couple of new flavor/seasoning ideas for the croccantini line. I hope I'm not breaking any eGullet rules with this (my apologies in advance if so), but we would welcome your suggestions for new flavors or seasonings. Currently we have are Original, Rosemary, Black Pepper, Sesame, Garlic, Fennel, Tomato-Oregano, Onion and Whole Wheat. We are especially interested in ideas for flavors that have a bit more kick, since, excepting the Black Pepper, all of our seasonings are quite mild. Feel free to post your suggestions here or email them to me directly at paul@lapanzanella.com, whichever is more convenient (or allowed). Thank you. Thanks again for your feedback!

Rona, thanks for the suggestion. What we do with the crackers that bake properly but break prior to packaging is to put them in a samples case and send for free to our distributors and retailers with their regular orders. At the store the sample pieces often end up being paired with a cheese or a spread like tapenade to expose customers to both products. We give to the compost folks only those crackers that didn't bake properly.

Hi, I'm Paul Pigott, the owner of La Panzanella. We are a small, Seattle-based company, and I'd like to thank you for your feedback, both good and bad. I'd like to respond to your comments about our product as succinctly as possible, and hopefully won't come across as too belligerent or defensive! Regarding our packaging, we now offer the croccantini to our distributors (who in turn offer to the retailers) in the familiar 8 oz bag and the new 5 oz box. The retailers buy from the distributors the one they think will sell best in their area. The box, of course, provides better protection against breakage and a lower price. We sell the box to our distributors (we rarely sell directly to stores) at 37% below our bag price, since the box has 37% fewer ounces. We expected that our distributors and retailers would keep roughly the same relative proportion between the products as they add their markups, but we naturally have no say in the matter, and it sounds like that is not always the case. Regarding our price to distributors, we have not raised our prices to distributors since the middle of 2007. Our flour costs have doubled since last summer, but we have decided to hold to the current level until 2009 if possible. However, there is no doubt that our distributors and retailers are raising prices of almost all of the items they sell, not just ours, which we all see when we pay the grocery bill! Breakage of the crackers is the single biggest complaint we receive. We also receive the most compliments, aside from the taste of the crackers, about the classic simplicity of our bags! These two things are in contradiction, and so we have let the market decide for us. The crackers continue to grow in popularity, so we decided to not change the bags, but work on improving the shipping cases to prevent breakage. We have improved the cases tremendously, and so receive fewer complaints from our distributors, but some breakage does occur. But, at the store, people naturally choose the unbroken crackers first (even if the first thing one does is break them in order to eat them at home!), so that may explain why one sees a fair amount of breakage in the remaining ones at the store--all the "good" ones were taken first! As far as the box not allowing one to see all the crackers to examine for breakage, well, only if we had a 100% clear plastic container would that be possible. We actually explored doing that, but plastic is prohibitively expensive (it's petroleum based) and the last thing we wanted to do was to choose to raise our costs and have to pass that on to consumers. That's also why we didn't put plastic in the openings in the box. Steven, thanks for the feedback on the small windows of our box though--we'll see if there is a way to provide a little better product visibility without ruining the structural integrity of the box. Our original bakery has indeed closed (we had a small retail and bread operation in addition to baking the crackers) as we wanted to focus on the crackers. We have now moved the bakery to just outside of downtown Seattle. We do not outsource the baking of the product because quality control is very important to us. These crackers are actually very difficult to make--some days we have to throw away over 30% of our product because it didn't bake to our standards. (Actually, we don't throw away the waste, we give it to a local composting company). But I'd rather throw away all of a day's baking rather than ship something we can't be proud of. I hope the above helps addresses some of your questions and comments. Let me close by reiterating that I greatly appreciate ALL of your feedback, as well as your support of our crackers.