We said it before and we say it again – besides providing a variety of tasty gluten-free cereal with exactly the ingredients you like to you, everyone at Custom Choice Cereal is really passionate about sports and especially College sports. Of course UNC is our favorite, and last night saw the game of the biggest rivalry in College sports: UNC played Duke at the Dean Dome, and as we said at least in the Triangle area it is one of the few sporting events that is more important than the Super Bowl.

There were a couple of impressive runs from both teams, and it was a close game until the last 10 minutes. Unfortunately the outcome was not as we had hoped because the Blue Devils took home a win by 10 points (64:54). Though UNC’s free throw shooting and rebounding were (again) not very encouraging (Duke on the other hand had 23 offensive rebounds!), we still thought that this was probably the most impressive performance thus far in the 2009/2010 season. Our defensive game improved significantly, and maybe they can still make it to the tournament…

Those of you who have been following Custom Choice Cereal know that there are two things that we are passionate about: providing delicious, customizable gluten-free cereal as a great alternative to the gluten-free “cardboard options” that are out there – and Carolina. As a matter of fact, one of the criteria in designing our logo was that it had to have Carolina Blue in it .

As every Tar Heel knows today is the biggest day of the academic year since our basketball team is playing the “school down the road” aka the Duke Blue Devils in the Dean Dome tonight.

Anything is possible in the ACC, and certainly when it comes to our Tar Heels playing Duke, the biggest rivalry in College sports. Given this year’s Conference records (Duke 7-2, UNC 2-6) we are ready for the worst, but as they say – hope dies last…

For a change this will not be a blog about our delicious customizable gluten-free cereal. Instead it will be about one of my other great passions: UNC basketball! As some of you might know, this passion was the reason to include Carolina Blue as a color in Custom Choice Cereal’s logo

Last night saw the re-match of the 2009 NCAA National Championship game against Michigan State which Carolina won 89:72 to claim its 6th National Title. UNC had the home advantage, and the fans clearly supported their team frantically! Judging from his expression during the game Roy Williams would probably disagree with me. However, I was truly impressed by UNC’s young team and very happy to see another Tar Heel win with a final score of 89:82. It seems 89 is UNC’s number in this match-up.

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.

A little while back we wrote about the photo shoot that the Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative (CEI) did at our facility in the Research Triangle Park for their next monthly e-newsletter. The CEI is an initiative at UNC with the goal of spreading entrepreneurship across campus, and their e-newsletter for October has been sent out today. Click on the picture below to read the full article about Custom Choice Cereal and our delicious custom gluten-free cereal:

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.

So far we have been working out of a room at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but this is about to change.  Through the great help of our outstanding real estate broker – Synergy Commercial Advisors – Custom Choice Cereal will likely/hopefully be able to move into our mixing facility by the end of next week.  We are extremely excited about this and are in contact with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (NCDA&CS) to get the facility inspected soon after setting it up.  Hopefully we can show some pictures of the facility soon!

By the way, the people at the Food & Drug Protection division within the NCDA&CS are very friendly and helpful, so we can only advise anyone who plans to start a food business to get into contact with them rather sooner than later.