Custom Choice Cereal is really interested in where and how you first heard about the option to customize your gluten-free cereal mix through our online platform. Since we are aware that all of you have time constraints and cannot spend minutes on a lengthy survey we ask that you please give us literally seconds of your time and answer the survey at the top of the left sidebar!

Of course you can always comment on this blog entry. Thank you very much!

Over the past couple of days we received a couple of emails asking for an explanation of our packaging. Questions ranged from the very broad “How do you package my gluten-free cereal?” to “Does the custom cereal that I receive in the mail include the nutrition facts I see on the homepage?” and “What is the purpose of the mix ID on the bag”?

We at Custom Choice Cereal thought that it would be a wise decision to also explain our packaging here on our blog. You can see the front of one of our gluten-free cereal mixes on the right. It shows the individual name that you can give your personal cereal – in this case “UNC Fall 2009″ – below our logo as well as the total weight in ounces in grams.

Now to the more important backside of the bag which you can see on the left. It shows the nutrition facts of your cereal with the % Daily Values based on a 2,000 calorie diet as well as the ingredients that you chose below the nutrition information. That way you always know the nutrition values of the gluten-free deliciousness you are enjoying. It is the same info that automatically updates on our website as you add ingredients to your cereal. The number of servings for each ingredients are displayed in brackets right after the ingredient, i.e. “Apples (2)” means that you added two servings of apples to your mix.

Finally and most importantly, the mix ID and date of preparation of your custom gluten-free cereal is displayed at the bottom of the backside. Especially the mix ID is important as it allows simple reordering by entering it on our homepage. You also find information on how to contact us at the bottom of the label.

Custom Choice Cereal introduced PayPal as an additional payment option on its website. Just select the radio button if you would like to pay for your custom gluten-free cereal using PayPal as illustrated in the picture below. You will then be automatically directed to your standard PayPal login screen. You know the drill from there.

Custom Choice Cereal is now live with a new and more intuitive checkout cart! We designed this cart to increase user friendliness and speed of the checkout process for you as our customers. Please send us an email let us know what you think!

Custom Choice Cereal went live today with its awesome new face-lifted website. We are extremely excited about this change and hope that you agree with us! We’d love to hear what you think, so please feel free (and be encouraged) to post comments or email us.

It may not seem like much but we gave a lot of thought to where we should place the links to the Gluten-free Tips & Tricks, About Us, etc. The goal was to make the main site more user friendly and easier to navigate for you as you create your customized gluten-free cereal mixes.

Last but not least we signed up to be included in a blog directory called Technocrati. It requires the posting of a funky code on our blog to verify our legitimacy, so here it is: 3qh68jcdn2. Let’s hope it works.

When Custom Choice Cereal created its profile on facebook, we tried to establish a vanity URL. At that time, facebook told us that we have to deal with the nasty automatically generated URL for our facebook presence and could only choose our URL once we reached the threshold of 100 fans. Thanks to all of you this magic number has been reached and you can now easily find us at www.facebook.com/customchoicecereal

It’s the little successes in life that make the day…

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…

Custom Choice Cereal is finally live with a beta version!

After long all the planning and preparations and learning about FDA regulations, nutrition labels, food compliance and current good manufacturing practice over the past couple of months we are proud to be able to announce the launch of our website.  Please have a look and explore here!

You would do us a great favor if you would surf the site and provide us with any feedback or suggestions, either by filling out the contact us template or just sending an email to info@customchoicecereal.com We appreciate your valuable input, you can help us improve!

Although it is tough to read, this document says that we passed inspection

The NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inspected our mixing facility today, and Custom Choice Cereal passed with flying colors! This means you don’t have to wait long to feast on our gluten-free, customizable cereal concoctions. We plan to put the finishing touches on the website next Monday, July 13th and perform rigorous testing during the remainder of the week. Be sure to visit again next week when we will finalize our launch date for the beta version of our website.

We commissioned Adam Hajnos, a local photographer and graphic designer, to take pictures of our ingredients for the website.  Unlike many of our competitors, our website will show pictures of the actual ingredients that will comprise our delicious cereal mixes.  I think you will agree that Adam did an outstanding job – just looking at the pictures makes me hungry for some gluten-free goodness!

Custom Choice Cereal is just a few short steps away from becoming fully operational and we hope to begin testing our website by the end of next week. Please enjoy your Independence Day holiday and don’t forget to spread the word about us to your friends and family!