From School Chaos to Korean BBQ

This past week felt like re-entry from orbit: my kids went back to school last Monday, which means mornings are now fueled by equal parts coffee and controlled chaos. Lunchboxes packed? Shoes on the right feet? Close enough. On the business side, we’ve been beefing up our freeze-dried ice cream sandwich inventory. That means more Orbit Cream Crunch ready to blast off into your snack cabinets. (Pro tip: they’re out of this world, but you don’t need NASA clearance to buy them.) Labor Day was less “day off” and more “all systems go” — but in the best way. We got together with friends and family for some seriously good Korean BBQ. Let me tell you: nothing makes you forget you’re standing around in the humidity like sizzling pork belly, endless kimchi, and laughing until your cheeks hurt. If eating is an Olympic sport, we definitely took gold yesterday. That’s the latest from my little galaxy. Until next week, may your snacks stay crunchy and your coffee strong. — Sara-Jane Shelvock CEO, Torus Coffee Company

Every September I forget this part. The first week of school is not really about the kids adjusting, it is about me adjusting, because suddenly there is a hard stop on my mornings and everything after that stop has to get smaller to fit. I am not a natural morning person and I never have been, so the fact that I run a food business and a household is itself a small miracle of caffeine and stubbornness.

The Orbit Cream Crunch inventory is the thing I am most pleased about this week. Freeze-dried ice cream sandwiches are the product I would eat if we did not sell them, which is probably the only honest test of whether something belongs in the catalog. They weigh almost nothing, they do not melt, and they survive an Iowa August in a way that regular ice cream simply does not. We have been packing them faster than we can photograph them, which is a good problem and also a slightly chaotic one.

I want to say something about Labor Day that is not just the usual complaint about holidays being work. The kitchen prep we did that day was the kind of work that feels good in your hands. You are organizing, you are labeling, you are setting up the week to go well, and none of it is urgent. It is the opposite of urgent. It is the calm version of the same job, and I do not get enough of those days.

The Korean BBQ was the highlight and I will not be taking questions. My husband handled the grill, which he does better than I do and has now been told so often enough that he believes it. Pork belly on a hot grill with kimchi and rice and the particular noise a family makes when everyone is talking at once — that is the sound I would pick if I could only keep one.

The Labor Day Trade

The Orbit Cream Crunch inventory is the thing I am most pleased about this week, because it is the first time the number went up instead of sideways. We have been holding steady for a month, and holding steady is not building.

Every September I forget this part. The first week of school is not really a transition, it is a full reset. The routine that governed the house for three months evaporates overnight and gets replaced by a schedule that requires an alarm, a packed lunch, and a form signed by Thursday. We adjust every year and I am surprised every year.

What makes it work is that we stopped trying to make the new schedule fit the old one. Production happens in the mornings now, before anybody has to be anywhere. That sounds obvious and it took us the entire month of August to arrive at it.

So the honest status is that we are behind on the marketing and ahead on the product, and for the first time I think that is the right order to be in. The product is the part that cannot be faked. The rest is a weekend of work whenever we get to it.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

Labor Day is the only holiday that feels like a transaction. You hand over the last of the warm evenings and in exchange you get a three-day weekend and the understanding that nothing else is free after this. We used ours the way we always do, which is to say we spent it working and told ourselves the working was the rest.

I want to say something about Labor Day that is not just the usual complaint. The reason we worked it is that the alley runs a tournament, and the tournament is the single best day of the year for us. Every lane filled, the kitchen going from open to close, and a room full of people who came here on purpose.

That is the version of a busy day I can get behind. Not the frantic kind where everything is going wrong and you are improvising. The kind where you planned for it, you have enough of everything, and the only job is to keep up. We were ready this year in a way we have not always been.

The kids worked the counter with us, which they do now without being asked, and I noticed halfway through that I had stopped supervising. That is a strange and good feeling. They know the register, they know the menu, they know when to come get me. None of that was true last summer.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC