December 18, 2008

Eat Your Almonds

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EAT YOUR ALMONDS….A new blog called On the Public Record is written by a “low level civil servant who reads a lot of government reports.” My kind of blogger! Today, LLCS brings to our attention the California Almond Board:

The good prices for almonds are the result of excellent work by the California Almond Board. The Almond Board has done magic and created demand for more than a billion pounds of California almonds in the past fifteen years. They have run marketing campaigns to get Americans to buy more almonds (“A can a day, that’s all we ask.” Do any of you really want a can of almonds a day?). They have created new almond drinks. They’ve introduced almonds into breakfast cereals. (Think back to the mid-nineties. Don’t you remember that breakfast cereals rarely had almonds in them?) California almonds have replaced and destroyed every other major source of almonds in the world. Right now on the Almond Board front page, they report happily that almonds are the number one nut ingredient in food.

This really is superior work by the Almond Board and I can only imagine that the walnut and cashew boards look on in envy.

Later, after a persual of their website:

They’re doing amazingly consistent high quality work and I wonder how that came about. Did they just happen to hire someone good, who built a good organization? Did that person love almonds or just doing good work? Coincidence that it was the Almond Board and not the Walnut Board or Citrus Board? Does everyone talk about almonds as the shining light of California agriculture because of some quirk of hiring and personality? Anyway, I don’t know what almond growers pay for the board (I assume some small percent of their price/piece), but they’re getting stellar value for it.

It sure seems to me that mixed nuts have a higher percentage of almonds (pronounced aamins, by the way, rhymes with famines) than they used to. Or is that my imagination? In any case, maybe the tofu folks need to hire away the guru behind the Almond Board’s success. It would make Ezra Klein happy, anyway.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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