Sabbatical Day 7 - B2B Experiment

Two years ago James and I did Bay to Breakers (B2B)with some friends. We walked from his place on Divis and Oak through the panhandle and to the edge of Golden Gate Park. On our way back, it was around lunch time, we had been drinking for hours and STARVING. Suddenly, we saw two ladies with cart selling egg rolls! We were so hungry we bought at least 10 eggrolls for our group-we didn't care what they cost.

Since then James and I always talked about how much money we would make if we sold food at B2B. This year, we decided to experiment and try our hand at selling Spam Musubis. People love Spam Musubis, right?

We found out this was semi right.

Before I get to the part where we sell the musubis, let me tell you about our process. The ingredients of Spam musubi include spam, rice, teriyaki sauce and seaweed.

Spam: We bought 4 Costco packs of Spam. Each Costco pack has 8 cans. Each can can create about 9 slices....that's 280 musubis. Woah! Luckily my friend Gina bought us a "luncheon meat slicer" and we were able to quickly and evenly slice the Spam to be musubi ready!

Rice: We made about 20 cups of rice. Our rice cooker (we call her Susie) can luckily make rice in 15 minutes with her quick cook function. We made about half the night before.

Seaweed: We've made musubis before where the seaweed wrapped around the entire musubi. We decided not to do that since we saw the pictures on the Spam can that only showed a strip of seaweed. We assumed that each sheet of seaweed could wrap 4 musubis.

Teriyaki Sauce: This was made the day before-a mix of mirin, soy sauce, and sugar.

Sunday morning we wake up at 8 with the intention of leaving for B2B at 10. Let me tell you, musubis take way longer than we thought! We thought we could 280 musubis but by noon, we only had 150!

By 12:30 we were at the Panhandle ready to sell. There were so many people we didn't know where to start! We ended up standing in one spot for a few minutes with the thought that people would come to us.

Didn't happen. So we chugged a few beers and walked around to different groups of people soliciting our musubis. People either had no idea what a musubi was, they were "vegetarian", or they were SUPER excited to see us. One girl actually questioned us why they were warm. Rice and meat should be warm....not cold. And they were fresh! Ugh. I found myself having to bite my tongue a lot.

End of the day, we sold about 100. We still made a profit after the materials which was great.

They unfortunately didn't sell like the hotcakes we thought they were and we didn't make as much as we thought we would.

Would I do it again? Heck yes. At least now I know how to efficiently make musubis and who to target when trying to sell them.