Weekly Wrap-Up: Veggie Pics & Twitter Love
Phew, it’s been a busy week around here but I wanted to write a quick wrap-up note for you – our lovely fans and friends.
We loved your comments and photo posts on Facebook this week! We’re looking forward to see how Rachelle Bloksberg’s cherry tomatoes turn out. In the meantime, Sarah-Mai Miller posted a couple of beautiful fresh homegrown vegetable pics. Check out these beauties:
This week’s special TWEET shout outs go to Alternative Outfitter, Melissa German, and eatpure who yet again showed us all-star support on Twitter this week. Thanks, guys!
In addition, we are grateful for all of the blog re-posts you all gave us this week. In case you missed it, some popular posts included: August’s Flavors: More Wheat-Free Options and Simple Chocolate Bliss.
Join the conversations anytime with AG on Twitter and Facebook. Happy Friday, Everyone!
Summertime Shipping and Eco-Friendly Chill Packs
Summer can be a hard time for shipping perishables. So much of the shipping process is out of our hands, and packages often sit in hot trucks, and on sunny porches before being opened and enjoyed.
Not to be deterred by a little heat, however, we’re pleased to offer a styrofoam-free, eco-conscious chill pack option for shipping vegan chocolates and other perishable items in warm weather. Our chill packs create much less waste and are lighter and more efficient to ship than traditional styrofoam boxes. Plus, we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee on all of our vegan chocolates and other confections and baked goods, when you follow our shipping guidelines.
Here are some tips for shipping perishable items in summer heat:
- Always include our recommended chill pack and ship via FedEx 2-day air.
- Ship to an address where someone will be present to receive the package.
- Do NOT include “deliver without signature” or “leave at front door” in the note to driver line. (These notes allows FedEx to leave packages in unknown conditions).
- If you’re shipping to a location over 90ºF, consider less perishable items like caramels, non-chocolate toffee and brittle, cookies and brownies.
- If you are unsatisfied with your products upon delivery and you followed the shipping guidelines above, write us an email with the details of your order for credit or re-shipment free of charge.
August’s Flavors: More Wheat-Free Options
August will be here next week, and it’s bringing with it some new and exciting wheat-free options to our brownie and cookie line-up. 
Sugar dusted (Wheat-Free) Cinnamon Snickerdoodle Cookies, and gorgeous (Wheat-Free) Toasted Coconut Brownies are sure to be the highlights of your summer. They’re not, however, our only wheat-free flavors. (Wheat-Free) Peanut Butter and (Wheat-Free) Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies also make our favorites list, as well as (Wheat-Free) Mocha and (Wheat-Free) Half Original/Half Pecan Brownies.
Interested in trying all of these flavors and more? Our Cookie and Brownie Samplers make great treats for the entire family and excellent corporate food gifts for environmentally-friendly and health-conscious businesses. For more compassionate corporate food gift ideas, check out our Gift Baskets and Gift Sets.
Simple Chocolate Bliss
We’re going back to basics for our vegan fudge flavor coming up in August. Simple flavors can often be the most delicious, and we think our simply elegant Original Fudge is the best thing this side of heaven. Plus, it makes a great chocolate gift for someone you love. 
All our vegan fudge is gluten-free by nature, as are many of our other chocolates, including vegan peanut butter cups, peppermint bark, and peppermint creme patties.
For summer-safe chocolate gifts we recommend double chocolate chunk cookies, classic and peppermint flavors of drinking chocolate, and individually-wrapped chocolate caramels for decadent chocolate flavor without the melt-ability factor.
Iced Chai Tisane
We all know that most foods are way better homemade than from the store. Have you ever thought about drinks in that same way? If you like iced chai from Starbucks, imagine how good it could be homemade! 
Here’s Allison’s recipe for perfect chai tea, which I highly recommend iced on these hot days. It’s easy to make, creamy and perfectly spiced, and if you use our Rooibos Chai Tisane (Herbal Tea), it’s caffeine free, so you can enjoy it any time of day or night.
What to use…
2 Tablespoons Rooibos Chai Tisane
12 oz filtered water
6 oz non-dairy milk of your choice
Your preferred sweetener
…and how
1. Place tisane and water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then turn off and steep for 5 minutes.
2. Add the non-dairy milk and steep for 2 more minutes.
3. Strain, sweeten to taste, ice and enjoy!
Weekly Wrap-Up: Toffee and Caramels
Welcome to another edition of Allison’s Gourmet weekly wrap-up. I hope you all had a fantastic week!
Thank you for the great Facebook activity this week everyone. We loved your comments on our homemade tempeh posts. Also, thank you so much for sharing this week’s blog posts with your Facebook and Twitter friends. If you missed it, everyone seemed to enjoy Vegan Toffee: Not Just for the Holidays post.
We’d like to give special shout outs to our fellow tweeple for your support: @Animal_Advocacy, @melissagerman, and @eatpure. The lovely @eatpure was kind enough to blog about our caramels! Check out her post here: Vegan Caramels. Thanks so much!!
We sincerely appreciate your support friends – keep us posted on what you’d like to see or hear more of, and don’t forget catch up with us on Twitter and Facebook. Have a great weekend!
Brownie O’Clock
Like so many other people these days, I realized a few years ago that I’m sensitive to wheat gluten. My sensitivity is partly what has prompted my move to make more of our products wheat-free and gluten-free. I was so tired of not being able to eat my own products!
Ever since we transitioned our organic brownies to be made with organic oat flour, I’ve had our baker make a few mini brownies in each batch, so that I can have some to taste test for “quality control.” Taste testing all of our products is one of my favorite parts of my job, but when our products were made with wheat, my taste tests of each organic brownie batch could only be one little bite. Now, I get to eat a whole mini brownie by myself if I want to! In fact, I’ve become so addicted that Tessa, my assistant, began calling my almost-daily brownie habit, “brownie o’clock”. The term has now expanded to include “chocolate o’clock” for Tessa, and “cookie o’clock” for my husband, David, who loves our new (Wheat-Free) Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies.
Do you have a daily ritual or special self-loving indulgence? What’s your “pleasure o’clock”?
Vegan Toffee: Not Just for the Holidays
Although many people think of toffee as a wintertime treat, around here it’s one of our staples year round. 
Vegan toffee is almost always one of the confections open for nibbling in the employee sweets stash, along with vegan peanut butter cups and peppermint creme patties. Despite its association with the holidays, vegan toffee makes an excellent warm-weather treat because it is almost completely impervious to temperature fluctuation. Although it may become slightly oily, and it’s chocolate coating may melt, our vegan toffee will not be seriously damaged by heat the way vegan peanut butter cups and other chocolate items would be. So break with tradition, eat toffee in the summer and don’t worry about your goodies melting!
Gift Baskets: Super-Deluxe Samplers in Pretty Packaging
Check out the gorgeous new packaging we finally have for our vegan gift baskets! Instead of different flavors of one kind of product, as you get with our Organic Tea or Just Cookies Samplers, our vegan gift baskets offer an elegant sampling of many of our products and are perfect for larger groups or for those who want to try a wide variety of our products. 
We have two gourmet coffee gift baskets which include either a four-flavor organic coffee sampler or a 12 oz bag of our superlative Peruvian Femenino coffee beans, as well as several flavors of cookies, brownies, fudge and confections all in one beautiful basket. These gourmet coffee gift baskets are the ideal way to spice up a social event or get an idea about your family’s favorite delicacies before birthdays and holidays come around.
Fair-Trade Refreshment, All Day Long
We all know that it’s important to stay hydrated in the summer. One of the best ways I’ve found to do this is to drink hot and iced teas and tisane (herbal teas). They’re more interesting than water, delicious and flavorful, without being too sweet. 
Our Organic Tea Samplers are a great way to have a variety of teas and tisanes on hand for all day tea sipping.
8am: Wake up gently with a warm cup of Organic Rooibos Earl Grey Tisane. This refreshing herbal tea offers sweet citrus notes and is caffeine-free.
10am: In India, people drink chai all day long, and you can too! Our Organic Rooibos Chai Tisane is a delicious caffeine-free treat hot or iced, any time of day.
1pm: Although we call it After Dinner Mint, this refreshing herbal tea is the perfect finish to any meal. End your lunch and start your afternoon with a tall, cold glass of our refreshing organic mint tisane.
3pm: Beat the afternoon yawns with a caffeinated wake-up. Organic Mango Ceylon Tea will do just that with it’s combination of earthy and delightfully fruity notes.
Fair-trade teas and tisanes, whether in tins or sampler pouches, also make perfect fair-trade gifts. So, whether it’s for yourself or someone else, give a fair-trade gift of delicious all day refreshment to someone you love this summer.
