Step Eight: Completion?

I hesitate to even say this, but I think I am finished with my Senior Project. It feels a little bit odd. I just put the final touches on my business plan as I would present it to investors. There are an incredible number of considerations for starting a small business, and quite frankly, I’m not sure I would have the guts. This website was my only attempt to advertise, and it took a considerable amount of time. I cannot imagine the time toll that constantly marketing yourself and your business would require.

I have decided that if I were to launch my own baking business, it would be based from home and I would be more likely to create mixes than finished products. This decision came from reviewing countless websites about starting a small business and reflecting on the limited size of the vegan consumer base. Mixes ship farther than finished products without concerns over spoilage. It would also decrease expenses related to constantly running the ovens and decrease start up costs because there would be no need to buy big commercial baking equipment.

I would also market through the internet, through either this site or a similar site to reach the largest clientele possible. I would also definitely continue offering surveys like the two I completed for this project because classmates still keep asking me if I am bringing more food. It was an easy and effective marketing approach. Not only that, but it reached people who ordinarily would not consider vegan food. If I went out into the community offering surveys and handing out business cards simultaneously, I think I could appeal to a larger range. My most popular recipe was also based around being a slightly more healthful recipe, so I think that could also be a successful promotional approach.

Note: The photo is another from Alon's. These are the recipes used commonly in the bakery.

Step Seven: Non Response Bias

I am a little bit more excited to have non response bias than I should be. After all, any kind of bias is a bad thing, but I’m excited to know what it is. Non response bias occurs when not all of the people surveyed respond. So basically, I handed out twenty surveys and only got nineteen back. I honestly do not know how that happened because most people don’t even walk away before they taste both samples, scribble something down and hand me their completed survey. I’m not too worried about it. I doubt one survey would have made a big difference.

On to the results! Cookie A, which was made with pecans, was the winner by quite a margin. It was the one that seemed cakey. It was fun reading the comments on this batch of surveys because most of them were so positive. I had one that said, “Not great, nut also not vomit-inducing,” so they weren’t all positive, but most said things like, “Both are delicious!” The most common complaint was that the cookies were not sweet enough.

Cookie A (Pecans)
Mean= 4.316 Standard Deviation=.862 Proportion Who Prefer A: 19/19

Cookie B (Almonds)
Mean=3.211 Standard Deviation= 1.06 Proportion who Prefer B: 0/ 19

Non-Response Error: 1

Again, these results are not random, but just for fun, I did another significance test, and surprise, surprise, these results actually ARE statistically significant. The p-value is .0015 which means that I could reject the idea of the preferences being basically the same at a 1% level! That may not mean much to most people, but I’m pretty excited about that. It means that people actually had a strong enough preference for it to be reflected in the results!

Here’s the recipe for Cinnamon Pecan Cookies
(modified from this recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=6391.0)

Ingredients: (at room temperature)
2 cups unbleached flour
2 tsps baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 tbs cinnamon
¾ cup chopped pecans, toasted
1 cup vegan sugar
¼ cup vegetable oil
¼ cup apple sauce
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup water

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and pecans.
2. In a second mixing bowl, whisk together sugar, vegetable oil, and apple sauce. When it is fully mixed, add vanilla, and mix. Add water and mix thoroughly.
3. Form a well in the dry ingredients and add wet ingredients.
4. Spoon rounded tablespoons of dough onto baking sheet. Press each ball down a little in the center. The cookies do not spread very much.
5. Cook for 5 minutes, then rotate the pan, and cook for another 8 minutes. Take the cookies out even though they may not look ready, and allow them to cool on the pan.

Step Six: The Final Recipe

My last attempt at making a yummy recipe comes in the form of cinnamon nut cookies. The concept came from a healthier version of the cookies I made back in October for my one year vegan anniversary. Reflecting back, I mentioned that they seemed too oily, so my first modification was to replace half of the oil with apple sauce. I decided not to replace all of it with apple sauce because of what Therese said about altering the chemistry of the recipe. I feel like I don’t know enough about the mechanics of food preparation to be sure that replacing apple sauce for oil will not cause a flaw in the overall result. Replacing only half seemed like a safer bet.

I decided not to make chocolate chip cookies as an afterthought. My recipe and the original recipe seemed way too similar to call it my own if I kept everything the same except for adding a little bit of apple sauce. Part of my reasoning for using nuts revolved around newfound knowledge that Therese shared about toasting nuts. It turns out, nuts will keep better raw but taste better toasted, so it’s better to buy them raw then toast them yourself for recipes. Also, apple sauce seems like a healthier alternative to oil, and nuts seem like a healthier alternative to chocolate.

To differentiate my two batches, I made one with almonds and one with pecans. I honestly expected them to taste basically the same with one tasting like almonds and the other tasting like pecans, but they are significantly different. One of them seems cakey and the other is thinner and chewier. I wish I understood what caused the difference. It will be interesting to see if my classmates notice a bigger difference than the type of nut.

Note: The photos are left over from my visit to Alon's yesterday.

Step Five: Alon’s

Today I met with my Senior Project Facilitator at her work. Therese says that she’s been working with Alon, the owner of the bakery, since before it opened. I was amazed by the scale of everything. When she made a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, for example, the dough alone weighed more than I do! The picture at the top of this post shows just a portion of all of the dough.

Unfortunately, Alon’s isn’t a vegan bakery, so Therese’s help was more general. It was still immensely helpful, though. I helped crack eggs and separate some butter (neither of which are vegan), but the kitchen was so efficient that I really felt like I was mostly just getting in the way. When I told Therese about the pound cake fiasco, she pointed out some really fundamental flaws that I hadn’t thought about. For one thing, when I tried to change a non-vegan recipe into a vegan recipe by just substituting certain ingredients, I was changing the baseline chemistry of the recipe. She thought I would be much more successful if I made a recipe that was already vegan my own. I guess on some level I realized there must be something that was profoundly different between non-vegan and vegan after the pound cake, but she was able to articulate and explain it much better than I. I feel like this experience put the final nails into the coffin of my original product. I think I will go ahead and try one more recipe, though. This time I’ll start with a vegan recipe.

Meanwhile, I’ve started working on a business plan to take the place of my original cook book plan. It’s interesting learning about how to present ideas to investors, and best of all, I think this product could give me experience that can be more practically applied to any form of business. Therese offered a wealth of advice about good business practices as well. She emphasized repeatedly the importance of using high quality ingredients and remaining passionate about what you are doing. She also told me that she does not recommend culinary schools for most people until they have some hands-on experience, too. She started in the business by acting as an apprentice to an established baker and feels that the method taught her everything she needed to know about baking in a more efficient format. In her opinion, the big negative of culinary or pastry schools is the cost paired with the way everything is done in groups. She says that if there is one strong member in a group they may just delegate jobs, so the weaker members never learn to do the whole process alone.

Mid Step: December Break

My family went to the beach for the New Year so I wasn’t able to try any new recipes, but my mom got me “Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar” for Christmas. I have a batch of cookies in the oven now. It’s amazing how much easier the recipes that others make are compared to my Pound Cake fiasco. I wonder how bakeries get their recipes. Do they modify tried and true recipes that others have created or does each baker start from scratch. I am even more against my original idea of creating a bunch of recipes for my product than I initially was not only because it was ridiculously difficult and yielded results that were only slightly above the neutral score of 3 but also because when I think about how a bakery would make products, my recipes seem useless. There’s no way a bakery could or would make recipes one pound cake at a time. I imagine they would be dealing with much larger sets of batches and ingredients at a time. I should really schedule a time to see the bakery where my project facilitator works so that I can see what they do there.

Step Four: Sour Cream Pound Cake Verdict

The verdict has arrived! By a very small margin, Cake A, the pound cake with homemade sour cream alternative is the winner! To conduct the sample, I surveyed twenty people offering them a piece of “Cake A” and “Cake B” and asking them to rate each cake on a scale of 1 to 5 for flavor. I also asked which cake they preferred and asked for any comments they might have about the cakes.

I was initially concerned that my classmates might not be honest with their opinions because they know me and might not want to hurt my feelings, so I made it a point to tell them that I was not emotionally invested in their preferences. Well, I needn’t have worried. Comments ranged from “Yum” to adding a third choice of “Neither” when asked which cake they prefer.

Being the math nerd that I am, I decided to perform a significance test on the results of my survey to see if the preference was statistically significant. Honestly, the requisites for performing such a test were not fulfilled because my sampling was not random. I preformed what is known as a “convenience sample” in the statistics world because I asked only people who I have classes with.

Here are the results of my sample:
Cake A (homemade sour cream alternative):
Mean= 3.4 Standard Deviation=1.02
Proportion who prefer A: 11/20
Cake B (Tofutti sour cream alternative):
Mean= 3.05 Standard Deviation= 1.07
Proportion who prefer B: 10/20 (Including the person who also circled “neither”)

The results were not statistically significant, for those who were wondering. I ended up with a p-value of .309. When looking for significance, smaller is better and at the very biggest, .1 is considered significant. Another problem I encountered was in my own survey making. When I made my rating scale, I meant to put “Worst Pound Cake I’ve Ever Tasted” for 1, but I said best on 1 and 5. I had to tell everyone to correct it on their individual paper. How embarrassing!

Here is the winning Recipe:

Ingredients (at room temperature)
½ cup Earth Balance Vegan Buttery Sticks
6 tbs ground flax seed + 9 tbs water
1 ½ cups flour
¼ tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 cup vegan sugar
½ tsp vanilla
½ cup sour cream alternative from http://www.theveggietable.com/recipes/sourcream.html

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9 by 5 by 3 inch loaf pan. Combine flour, baking powder, and baking soda.
2. In another bowl, beat earth balance buttery sticks and sugar for about ten minutes. Beat in vanilla. Slowly add flax mixture, scraping the sides of the bowl.
3. Add the dry ingredients and sour cream alternative, switching back and forth. Beat just until everything is combined.
4. Bake for 75 to 90 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

The picture shows what the sour cream alternative looked like when I made it.

Step Three: Improvisation

Today was my first experience trying a recipe of my own creation. I attempted to make a sour cream pound cake vegan. Suffice to say it was a disaster! I usually mix things by hand, so I never considered that I might need special equipment for mixing. My mom has an electric hand mixer, but it is small and inexpensive, so when she looked at how much mixing was called for in my recipe, she told me not to use it. She thought the motor might break, but she told me that I could improvise with the food processor. I hadn’t ever heard of using a food processor in that way but tried it anyway. It did not go well.

In all fairness, I’m not sure whether the food processor or the absence of real eggs caused the problems. Part of the recipe said to mix until fluffy…well, I mixed and mixed, but it never really even changed texture. It makes sense that eggs would be needed, but I thought that ground flax seeds would work. Everything I read made it sound like that was the ideal egg replacer for that situation, but I guess not. I made two versions of the cake, one with a commercial sour cream alternative (I used a product called “Sour Supreme” made by Tofutti) and a homemade sour cream alternative that I found a recipe for on this website (http://www.theveggietable.com/recipes/sourcream.html). Tasting the two cakes right out of the oven, neither tastes quite like the sour cream pound cake I know and love, but both taste good to me. I think I like the version with homemade “sour cream” better. Tomorrow I am taking both cakes to school to see which version my classmates like better.

All in all, it took me about four hours to make two cakes, including time spent cleaning up. I am sure it should not have taken so long. I can’t imagine what a bakery would do if it took them four hours to make two cakes. That’s just ridicules. I still need to make a short survey for tasters to fill out tomorrow at school, then I am looking forward to going to sleep. What an exhausting experience!