Tis The Season

The summer holidays have finished and thoughts have now turned to Christmas and I’m satisfied that we’re well ahead with our planning for the festive period.

Everything’s been ordered, including our turkeys. Christmas is obviously a key time for us at Croots, and we were delighted with how our first Christmas went last year. We’re hoping to build on that success this year. 
Before launching our festive period promotions though, we’ve been getting involved in British Food Fortnight. As we’re becoming so well known for our sausages locally, we’ve decided to hold a sausage competition to mark the event and ask our customers to come up with ideas for a new flavour. Hopefully this should create a bit of interest from our local media, as well as from our regulars! I’m a little nervous about some of the suggestions we may receive, but I’m sure our talented in-house butchers will rise to the challenge! Hopefully the winning sausages will be on sale at Croots as part of British Sausage Week later this year.

We’ve also received another piece of good news…Croots Coffee Shop has been short-listed in the Derbyshire Food and Drink Awards in the tea rooms/coffee house category. I resist the temptation to stare at every visitor in our coffee shop to try to work out if they could be the ‘mystery customer’ who’s judging the awards!

The coffee shop is getting quite a name for itself now – some Sundays we have a queue of people waiting with their newspapers as we’re opening up for breakfast. When we’ve had sunny weather, customers have been able to sit on the decking and enjoy the beautiful views over the Ecclesbourne Valley, which has been fabulous. The decking area has been a real bonus, as it doubles the capacity for tables.