You might not be aware of it, but you are experts in many aspects, and that is the reason why we are asking you for your advice! Custom Choice Cereal is in the middle of preparations for several gluten-free food shows, and in this context we are debating the background colors for a banner that we would like to print and display at our table. After a couple of days of internal discussions and very diverse feedback from friends and family we have narrowed the selection down to three options.

It then dawned on us: you are the decision makers and the best source of information that we have to improve Custom Choice Cereal, so we ask your opinion! It would be absolutely outstanding if you could have a look at the three pictures below and comment on this blog which of these options – orange, blue or yellow – you like the best.

Thank you very much for your feedback, your input makes a big difference!

The team at Custom Choice Cereal has its moments, and in one of them we started to think about where and when we first heard about the concept of customizing a product. What interested us even more was how the concept has evolved since then.

It must have been around 2001/2002 (in a class in College) that we first heard about NIKEiD, a service that lets you design you own line of clothing. This service was initially launched in 1999 and was considered modular customization. The same is true for the automobile industry where customers can specify the color, engine, interior material, rims, sound system and more of their car with a so-called configurator. All major car manufacturers nowadays offer this service as a quick google search reveals.

A newer phenomenon however is customization in the food industry. Besides our custom gluten-free cereal there is another start-up that we particularly like: Chocomize lets you customize your chocolate through an easy process similar to ours: start with dark, milk or white chocolate and add up to five ingredients from the categories nuts&seeds, fruits, herbs&spices, candy, decorations and other. It’s a creative idea and definitely makes a great gift. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t like chocolate?!

Over the past months of operations we have met a lot of great people who are involved in raising awareness for celiac disease, helping fellow celiacs, and finding and sharing gluten-free information. Borrowing terminology from Zach, writer of the blog Gluten Free Raleigh, we refer to some of these as our “internet friends”. Hopefully Custom Choice Cereal will have a chance to meet more and more of them as time goes on!

To some of these friends we are talking on a regular basis, and one of them is Cain who refers to himself as “Head Honcho” of The Celiac Maniac.com. Cain started a Gluten-Free Online Radio that broadcasts every Thursday from 1:30pm – 2:30pm PST. Today starting at approximately 4:50pm EST we will talk live to Cain about our company, our gluten-free facility, our products, and our philosophy. It should be interesting and fun, so please join!

A couple of weeks ago we saw that our Alma Mater UNC celebrates its Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009 from November 16-22. Events during this week include entrepreneurial guest speakers as well as case competitions and an Entrepreneurship Fair.

Everybody at Custom Choice Cereal loves to come back to Chapel Hill every once in a while, and so we took the opportunity to meet current and past students who are entrepreneurially minded. It was great fun and we were able to spread the word about our custom gluten-free cereal some more. You can see the full program for this week by clicking on the picture below.

Back in July when we had basically just graduated from the Kenan-Flagler Business School and were working on our website, one of our former professors approached us and asked if we wanted to present the company in one of his classes. We could not possibly decline, so today Patrick and I went back to campus to present Custom Choice Cereal and our concept of customizable gluten-free cereal to a class of students.

After about 15 minutes of presentation time, they started grilling us with their questions, and I must say that some were really impressive. The entrepreneurship program is obviously alive and kicking, it was fun for us to come back and see what current students are doing.

Today we received an email from Kristin Prelipp Oguntoyinbo. She is the photographer at KPO Photo who did the photo shoot for the CEI with us on Friday.

She wrote a little article about Custom Choice Cereal on her blog, and we wanted to share this with you. Have a look at these great pictures and feel free to read to accompanying article! On one of the pictures you can even see how we prepare your gluten-free deliciousness

Today was an exciting day for the crew at Custom Choice Cereal! The Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative (CEI) offered to feature our gluten-free custom cereal business in their next newsletter and came by with a photographer to take pictures. It was a lot of fun, and if you have always been wondering what the faces behind Custom Choice Cereal, our office, our dedicated gluten-free mixing facility look like make sure you don’t miss out on the next CEI newsletter!

The purpose of the CEI is to promote entrepreneurship across UNC campus, and their newsletter helps to achieve this goal and has featured a lot of great local companies in the past. The best part is that they also include updates about formerly featured entrepreneurs so you can follow their stories. For a young start-up like Custom Choice Cereal this presents a great opportunity to spread the word about customizing your personal gluten-free cereal. As they say: Classic win-win-situation.

We are as eager as you are to launch Custom Choice Choice Cereal to the broader public, offering customizable gluten-free cereal mixed in a dedicated facility. However, implementing the valuable feedback and suggestions that we have received and keep receiving takes us longer than expected. We identified several projects that are currently taken care of and we decided to update the website as soon as a project is completed. Those of you who follow us will thus see gradual improvements of the site.

Please excuse the delay, but it is proof that the old rule about programming and website development holds true: Take the estimated time and multiply by a factor of (at least) 2.5! As entrepreneurs we learn every day, and this is yet another step on the learning curve…