For the time being, our menus will not include strawberries.

As it goes with any business, the costs of doing business are constantly in flux. Prices go up, prices go down. When it comes to food, price fluctuations can be surprisingly large. That’s why, for example, most places have an “MP” next to their Lobster Roll on the menu. While many of us have come to expect the cost of lobster to change significantly from day to day, similar price fluctuations can happen with every single item, every single day. Since it’s become increasingly easier and more efficient to move raw ingredients from coast to coast, many consumers will never even be aware that seasonality and availability will shift the cost of a bag of lettuce, box of oranges or flat of berries from week to week.

For the past several winters, we have had to make a tough choice as it pertains to one of our most popular ingredients: the strawberry. Every year around November, the strawberry crops in Florida and California start to freeze, the supply of berries drops, the quality plummets and the price spikes outrageously.

Up until this year, we’ve tried to find ways to make it all work. We made a modest price increase on our strawberry items year-round in order to continue to provide them at a reasonable margin in the winter. We’ve explored using different local and national distributors. Last year, we even tried to anticipate this annual situation by purchasing as many local strawberries as we could in their short Vermont growing season, processing them into a compote and freezing the compote for this winter spike. We thought the increased locality of the product would win our customers over – unfortunately, the compote was not what our Lovemaker and Strawberry Shortcrepe faithful were expecting or hoping for.

So last week, we had to take a hard look at some serious numbers. 35,749. That’s roughly the number of crepes with strawberries we’ve sold at our brick and mortar locations year to date. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly double the number of Veggie Monsters, our most popular savory crepe, that we sell in an entire year. Wow, we thought, we sell a hell of a lot of strawberries. Meanwhile, the price of strawberries nearly doubled, literally overnight. While we internally deal with the realities of a global food system every day, most of the people that come visit us looking for a crepe probably don’t – so a $20 Lovemaker for the winter months probably wouldn’t be welcome or make much sense to our strawberry loving friends.

And then there’s the other bottom line. While people love strawberries, our earth probably doesn’t. Strawberries annually top the list of the Environmental Watch Fund’s Dirty Dozen – that is to say industrial strawberry cultivation requires the most pesticide treatment of any fruits or vegetables on the market. Sadly, organic strawberries are not entirely immune to pesticide treatment either. Outside of Vermont’s short 4-6 week strawberry growing season, the rest of the year our berries come from monoculture farms in warm weather states, leading to increased carbon emissions associated with transporting product from there to here. While we are deeply committed to sourcing locally, we are also committed to ensuring our food is accessible to folks who are not as obsessed with local food as we are…so we keep ‘gateway foods’ like strawberries and chocolate hazelnut spread in stock all year round. Until now…

Rather than substitute a compote that doesn’t meet everyone’s standards for yum or sell fresh strawberries that do not meet our expectations for environmental, price, or quality standards, we’re pulling them off the menu for now. Yep, that’s right…for the time being, strawberries have been dropped from all our menus. No more Lovemakers, Heartbreakers or Strawberry ShortCrepes. Strawberries will likely find their way back onto our menus once the price and quality of the berry stabilizes, but like we did last year with Nutella, we recognize that we need to find a long-term solution to our less than healthy year-round addiction.

How do you break such a popular (and revenue generating) addiction? For starters, we’ve tried our best to reduce our use of strawberries in weekly specials. Also, for the first time this summer and fall, we began to drop Lovemakers and Heartbreakers at mobile vending events in favor of more sustainable and locally available fruits like apples and blueberries.

Even more boldly, our Skinny Pancakes in Stowe and Sugarbush will be strawberry free when they open this winter. When you consider the 1,200 Lovemakers we sold in Stowe alone last winter, this was not a decision we made lightly. But, when considering the food system as a whole, the strawberry just isn’t something that should be widely available throughout a Northern Vermont winter, and we decided our menus at ski resorts should paint a more accurate reality.

We hope that one day there’s a solution to our seasonal strawberry conundrum that doesn’t disappoint the strawberry lovers of Pancakia, and we’re hopeful that there is. Our ultimate goal is to effectively bridge the gap between consumer’s wishes and the realities of our seasonal food system.  Last year, we were amazed to see how some of our local growers were able to extend the season. We also hold out hope that the local compote we keep stocked in the freezer will become more acceptable on our menus long term. Our northern neighbors in Quebec have been building up their organic strawberry crops, which is a great option during their growing season, and through greenhouses and indoor hydroponics, may one day be able to provide us a reasonably priced organic berry in the winter. But none of these solutions solve the strawberry problem we face today.

So, for now, we’ll be eating blueberries. Please, join us. 

A curveball is being thrown next weekend by Vermont’s finest band, Phish, and we are lucky enough to be part of it. Seriously people, SERIOUSLY, we are SO excited about this, it’s just silly.

It all started this spring when we heard rumors of Phish throwing another magical summer festival at Watkins Glen, the giant speedway in upstate New York. So we reached out to their production team to get in on the fun. They got back to us: “Dream big, let’s do this.”

There is the feeling of excited when you’re kind of excited… and then there is a whole other kind of HOLY S#*T THIS IS AWESOME kind of excited that we felt at that moment. So we immediately got to work. We dreamt, we planned, and we collaborated with the best, most creative logistics team we could find. Fast forward to this moment right now, our amazing building team is driving across the great state of New York with 3 huge flatbed trailers full of too many things to describe, which we will be putting together into a 100 seat restaurant complete with shaded hammocks under pergolas, a big beer garden with lawn games and Fiddlehead Brewery suds, as well as a farmer’s market with local organic meats, vegetables and even Jasper Hill Farms cheese.

When we say this has been a long time coming for us, we meen a loooooonnnggg time coming. We here in Pancakia are anything but alone in our love for Phish. I believe Winston Churchill once said something like, “Never before was so much awesome created by so few.” OK, he didn’t say that, but you get the point: love for the good time Phish creates goes way back. In the case of Pancakia, it harkens back to one of our first shows: the world famous New Years’ ‘95 Show at Madison Square Garden. 8 years (and many many shows) later, in our first week of operations as a little cart on Church St, bassist Mike Gordon cruised by on his Segway, bought a crepe, and then (we swear) five minutes later cruised by again and bought another. We’d like to think that Mike’s first bites of Skinny goodness still lingered in his memory nearly twenty years later when we got invited to this festival.

There is at least one thing that we here at the Skinny would like to think we share in common with Phish: they are through-and-through Vermont. They started here, they love it here, and they work together with other Vermonters like Russ Bennett to share their fun wackiness with the whole world (who else remembers the World’s Largest Cowbell Ensemble?).

Fun fact: Phish started playing at Nectars; the first commercial kitchen we ever used was Nectar’s. Burlington had a rich culture and a great music scene before Phish came into the fold, but it is inarguable that their giant cultural contribution is part of why we now punch so far above our weight as a city, both musically and otherwise.

Here’s what we can tell you about next weekend: the surprises will never end and the ridiculousness will never stop.  No band could singularly get so many people to come out and keep all of them entertained 24 hours a day. We are lucky to be part of it, and we hope that we can put just a little bit more curve in this year’s curveball. Hope to see you there!

This upcoming Sunday, 4/22 is Earth Day. Every day is Earth Day, as far as we’re concerned, but Sunday really really is ACTUAL Earth Day. In our crepe-addled minds, we believe Earth Day should be one of the biggest holidays of the year. After all, most holidays are just one country’s holiday, or one religion’s holiday, but Earth Day is everyone’s holiday and this beautiful planet of ours really needs some tender loving care.

This Earth Day, we hope you can join us to celebrate and support this one and only planet we have. This year we decided to keep it super local, to a place literally right outside our front door that certainly deserves some attention: the one and only Lake Champlain. This amazingly beautiful body of water is under threat from, among other things, phosphorus, pollution, and surface runoff, and has taken a good 150-year beating from various industrial activities on her shores. Luckily there are some amazing organizations out there trying to help clean up the Lake, and others that help get us out on and around the lake. This Earth Day we’re focusing on the latter.

How does getting us out on Lake Champlain help preserve it? The more people choose to hang out in the lake’s glorious embrace, the more they will come to enjoy it, the more they will care to protect it. This year we have decided to focus our support on 2 organizations that get people out on and around Champ’s waters: Local Motion and The Community Sailing Center. For 4/22, we’re giving away up to $422 to these amazing non-profits that love our Lake: for every $10 donated to these groups, we will donate $4.22!

Here’s a little bit about what they do and how they help the lake:

The Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center: this place is like no other. Most cities have an exclusive country club on their shores, but uur great city has a community center that affordably gets people of all ages and income brackets out onto the lake. They offer summer camps, sailing instruction and racing, paddle boarding, canoeing, kayaking, and yoga. They’ve got “Leader Ship” programs for kids, women’s programs, and adaptive sports programs. Lake Champlain is a gift, and the Community Sailing Center makes sure everyone can take part in unwrapping it.  Donate $10 here and we’ll match it with $4.22!

Local Motion: right now, you may be thinking, OK, Mr. Pancake, you said this was a lake-centered thing, Local Motion is a bike-centered thing.  Bikes don’t go on lakes. Oooohhh but they do, thanks to the good folks at Local Motion. They run the bike ferry across the gap on the Lake Champlain Causeway, making the crucial connection between the Lake Champlain Islands and the Burlington Bike Path. And this is just one spoke in Local Motion’s proverbial wheel: they are among the most prominent advocates for Bike Path rehabilitation, they help businesses become bike-supportive, they help make our streets safely bike-friendly, and they provide valet bike parking at major events all summer. Donate $10 here and we’ll match it with $4.22.

Combining your love with our love, we’ll raise $1422 for these amazing organizations, $14.22 at a time. Please join us, and from all of us in Pancakia, HAPPY EARTH DAY!

Support the work of Salvation Farms by ordering some Hash Purples!

Have you tried these deliciously deep-fried wonders? Hash Purples are made with local beets and carrots, a magical rarity in our Vermont food system as they can be enjoyed and stored year round. Among the most nutritious veggies we grow in VT, beets and carrots also showcase the hard work of Salvation Farms, a non-profit working hard to glean, process, store, and redistribute produce to those who need it most.

Last year they gleaned more than 1700 lbs of beautiful beets in the state of Vermont. So to help support their awesome work, we will donate $1 for every order of Hash Purples to Salvation Farms this spring until we have transformed 25% (425 lbs) of their bounty into our delicious fried purple munchies.

So right now, you’re probably thinking: why would hundreds of pounds of quality local food go unsold? The truth is, fresh, wholesome food stays on farms all of the time—and a lot of it. In the US, it is estimated that 10 MILLION TONS (ReFED report) of food is lost on farms annually and more than 14 MILLION POUNDS (SF study) in Vermont alone.

Farms in Vermont experience a booming lush of harvest every summer and fall – sometimes so overwhelming they run out of time to harvest crops like beets, cabbage, and carrots; or they try to sell into an already saturated market. In addition, some produce is simply not pretty enough for retail shelves, “ugly” produce so to speak. With more than 10% of Vermonters living in food insecure households, Salvation Farms saw all this under utilized bounty as an opportunity for change.

Working with volunteers and training a small team of professionals, this scrappy, hardworking organization based out of Morrisville redistributed nearly 200,000 lbs of not perfect, but perfectly good produce from Vermont farms to consumers in 2017. The team gets down and dirty gleaning on farms and also receives produce from farmers and gleaning programs statewide. In a packroom in Winooski, SF washes, organizes, processes and packs produce to distribute to nutritionally insecure Vermonters, working with organizations such as The Vermont Foodbank and the Chittenden County Department of Corrections.

This little team has already fed thousands of people, saved millions of servings of quality produce from remaining uneaten on farms, and helped develop a talented local food workforce of people who might have otherwise had trouble finding work.  All of this has been accomplished by just a 4-person full time team of hard-working visionaries and many, many volunteers. It’s a model for how the country can help feed our citizens, maximize local resources, and support farmers. So, come down to the Skinny Pancake, enjoy some hash purples, and know that $1 of your purchase goes right to a group who will receive every penny of that donation doing amazing work for our environment and our neighbors who need it most.

sources:

https://www.hungerfreevt.org/hungerinvermont/

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/american-food-waste/491513/

To learn more about SF and food waste, watch episode 6 of the Local Motive!

Howdy folks,

We are getting rid of Nutella.

Now, before you start throwing crepe batter at me, hear me out…

Yep, we know you love Nutella. Heck, we made about 40,000 crepes with Nutella in 2017 alone…that’s approximately 7207 pounds of gooey chocolate and hazelnut nom-nom goodness. 

But there’s a deep, dark secret that y’all may not be aware of: the second ingredient in Nutella is modified palm oil, which is what gives Nutella its silky, spreadable texture. As far as our one and only Planet Earth is concerned: palm oil sucks.

Why? The equivalent of 300 football fields of rainforests are deforested every hour to make way for palm oil plantations and demand is projected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050. Rainforests, on the other hand, are essential to our climate’s health and stability: sucking up climate-change-causing carbon dioxide, providing habitat for more than 10 million species of flora and fauna, and producing more than 20% of our world’s oxygen. There’s no way around it: palm oil is the enemy of the rainforest and Nutella is dependent on palm oil. And while Nutella and its parent company have made efforts to reduce their environmental impact, those words on the ingredient list just never sat easily with us. 

If you’re hip to the ways of the Pancake than you know we are on a mission to change the world by building a safer, healthier and more delicious foodshed. So while wildly popular, Nutella has been this unspoken black eye on our mission all along. Surprisingly, we have never gotten a single guest complaint about it. But we knew and we care. So what were we to do? Do we stay loyal to our Nutella-loving guests or remain committed to our mission? 

The great Alan Newman solved this riddle for us. You may know Alan as the co-founder of Magic Hat Brewery, Seventh Generation and Gardener’s Supply. Holy moly, right? We asked Alan, “Please, font of wisdom…help us?!?” Ask and ye shall receive: in a transmogrification of Yoda and Gandolf, Alan sniggled, “Make not the mistake in choosing the tyranny of the ‘or’, when the genius of the ‘and’ can be at hand.”  Preach on, brother!!! Our Nutella conundrum need not be a binary choice between our values OR our guests!  We can pursue our mission AND improve the tastes our guests have come to love. 

So, with those words in mind, we set out on a quest of Odyssean proportions. We would find a higher quality, BETTER TASTING, and much more sustainable chocolate hazelnut spread. We were nearly shipwrecked and left for lost several times over…and yet like Ernest Shackleton, we never gave up and eventually found our Elephant Island: this palm oil free chocolate hazelnut spread we now present to you, our eager crepe-eaters.

The second we passed this savior of a spread across our lips, we just…knew. We knew it was better. Richer. Nuttier. Rounder than Nutella….and as smooth as this blog post. And the icing on this “NEWtella” cake: it’s a more sustainable product because it does not depend on Palm Oil. No ingredients destroy the rainforest. And it wasn’t just the palm oil that concerned us about Nutella. Nutella also uses soy lecithin (from GMO soy) and vanillin, which is an artificial vanilla flavor used instead of real vanilla extract. Our new product contains no artificial flavors. This magical goop is better for the planet, better for the body, and better for the taste receptors.   

So for all you Nutella fans out there: #SorryNotSorry. We got rid of a product that many of you loved, cherished and some even bathed in….but the earth is grateful, and we think you’ll love this stuff too.

-Benjy Pancake

Hi there! On Monday, June 19th our flagship location on the Burlington waterfront turns 10 years old. As we reflect on 10 years of this restaurant, and 14 years in business, we thought we’d share the tale of how we learned to love and source local. We figure we ought to air some dirty laundry in hopes to inspire others that they can do it too.

As of our last audit in October, we source over 70% of our raw and value-added products are locally sourced, but it was not always that way. In fact, when we first opened as a cart on Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace in 2003, exactly 0.0% of our food was sourced locally. Yup, you read that right. We were single source shoppers, and Costco had everything we needed: flour, butter, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, eggs, milk, strawberries, Nutella, ham, shredded cheddar cheese….and the prices were great. We didn’t do much business that first summer. In fact, companywide today, we will do more business in a good hour now than we did that entire year. Even though we sourced from just one location, and even with only a modest amount of business, it was hard. When you’re a one-man show, you do all the showing yourself. You wear all the hats. Sales, service, prep, cooking, accounting, repairs, and maintenance. And if something breaks, there’s no money to throw at the problem…it’s Yankee ingenuity (re: duct tape) followed by time and as a last gasp, money…

That first summer was so tough, in fact, that we rented the business to a friend for the summer of 2004. The cost: buy us a new trailer to replace the one I flipped over while driving our handmade cart to its storage for the winter. Well, thank goodness for that friend, Michael Rimoin, because he saw the light. He had fun out there and managed to nearly double our sales in year two. He had so much fun that he convinced me I had to come back…and thus began the process of long term crepe dreams.

In 2005, the local food movement was starting to heat up, especially in Vermont. We still sourced just about everything from Costco but had enough awareness to go to The Intervale and enjoy Pick Your Own berries from Adam’s Berry Farm one afternoon. We brought a few pints back to our cart and sold them as a novelty. That said, we had FUN! We had some very basic systems and enough sales to modestly pay ourselves that year. The Skinny Pancake’s reputation was growing!

2006 was a big year for local food and for the Skinny Pancake. Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Delima” came out that April and spread like wildfire. That summer, the Skinny Pancake operated out of its first commercial kitchen: Nectar’s was kind enough to share their space with us. With commercial grade mixers, refrigeration, dish machines and more, we were much more efficient. Our fledgeling systems were growing stronger, and actually, legitimate, as was our following of crepe eaters. That year, we became the first ever cart to join the Vermont Fresh Network. We hung their plaque proudly and chased down what local food we could manage. We still shopped at Costco, but we bought King Arthur Flour and local dairy. We made a more regular habit of PYO berries. The experience of being able to source from down the road was incredible.

In 2007, we opened our first brick-and-mortar location at 60 Lake Street on the Burlington waterfront. Our building was LEED-certified. It housed Seventh Generation and Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. We looked up to our heroes at Ben & Jerry’s and American Flatbread and said, “If they can do it, so can we.” Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy came out that spring, following on the heels of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. We felt inspired and stepped it up. Our local food sourcing increased dramatically to include bacon, apples, whipped cream, honey, tofu, coffee, beer and more. Conspicuously missing, though: most proteins…

Business has a hierarchy of needs. Survival comes first. After making a trip around the sun, we gained confidence…we were saving a smidge of money. In 2008, we took a big, expensive step forward by adding local chicken to the menu. The difference in price between commodity chicken and local chicken is staggering. At five times the price, we watched our food margin fray by nearly 2% from our choice in chicken alone. But we managed it…

Every year since then we have continued to improve our local sourcing one item at a time. When we did our first local food audit in 2009, we were just barely over 50% local. Since then, our local sourcing has increased to upwards of 70%…that’s a 50% increase! In an effort to afford to source more locally, we focused on reducing the costs of our commodity foods. We worked with our teams on controlling their waste. We used every tool in the box, and some laying around outside the box.

As our local sourcing grew, as did our scale, and we discovered new challenges. It was no longer sufficient to just call up our farmers and buy without planning. We began to develop growing contracts that forecasted our demand for the entire season. Contracts allow our farmers to plant reliably without having to spend money on marketing or absorb waste. As a result, we have been able to get better pricing. But buyer beware: when we overcommitted on our basil for our pesto, for example, it led to $1000 in waste as we could not process it fast enough. We can still remember the daunting image of a literal ton of raw basil filling our commissary kitchen. Lessons were learned one at a time. For the pesto, we learned that we needed to move beyond a table top commercial food processor. We needed a large object called a ‘Verticle Chopper Mixer’ to get through it all. That VCM is now vital to our ability to freeze local pesto in season and thaw as needed year round.

Today we estimate that we source about $2,000,000 in local raw and value-added products annually. In order to manage the complex forecasting, contract, and communication process, we hired a full-time Local Food Coordinator, a recent UVM Food Systems Major graduate. We have picked the “low hanging fruit” in the local foodshed…and most of the middle hanging fruit too. There are still some elusive local foods that we just can not afford or can not get at scale. But we’re always working on it.

Hopefully the moral of this story is clear…but just in case, we’ll spell it out for you: ‘going local’ is a journey, not a destination. And it takes one foot in front of the other to get anywhere with it. If you’re an aspiring food entrepreneur intimidated by local sourcing, just take it one step at a time. You’ll get there.

One doesn’t forget the first time they witness the female powerhouse that is Steady Betty. For me, it was the Magic Hat Mardi Gras party in 2016 (Just a year ago? Sinful, I know). Kicking off that weekend by dancing to the 8-piece rocksteady band of all women is one heck of a way to kick off the annual March celebration. And as we welcome the ladies back to our Skinny Pancake Burlington stage this week, let’s dive a bit deeper into this crew.

Steady Betty has a hold over the Burlington area. From early sets at Radio Bean to bigger stages at Nectar’s and Higher Ground, to big outdoor shows at Grand Point North and Waking Windows. From the first minute the stew of bass, drums, and horns hit your ears, the aural impact works its way to your toes, and soon thereafter into a full on groove. Their reggae infused with dance and funk can get anyone on their feet – you see this from their long-time fans and first-time listeners alike.

While many folks originally associated Steady Betty with their early champion and occasional participant, Kat Wright, the roster of talent in this crew runs deep. With sound tech extraordinaire, Rachel Capobianco (who’s spent some time on the road with Mike Gordon), the incredible pipes of Mariam Bernardo (with her own album in the works), exceptional rocksteady guitar playing from Linda Bassick (of a weekly Radio Bean kids show among other projects), and an absolutely kick-ass collection of horns players – it’s very easy to throw the work SuperGroup at this collective.

Coming up with a variety of pieces with so many influences only makes the creative process that much more intriguing. Rocksteady inspiration comes from Dawn Penn, Judy Mowat and Phyllis Dillon. Linda Bassik sources support from other female musicians as an influence of encouragement and growth during her time with Steady Betty over the last five years. “I feel freer in my musical expression than I ever have before.”

So how would one support females artists here in Vermont? First off, don’t make any assumptions. “Don’t limit girls wanting to play instruments by telling them certain ones are for boys are certain ones are for girls,” says Bassik. Being inclusive just the beginning. Involvement in the Burlington area comes easy when there are so many fantastic venues around. Volunteering time at the Flynn or Higher Ground, or you can spend some time with the artists themselves – you can find many of them hanging out on any given night enjoying another local musician’s show.

Supporting organizations like Girls Rock Vermont is one way Steady Betty influences younger females with an interest in music. One of the Girls Rock mottos is “we build each other up” which is exactly what women must do. No judgment, no comparisons. Linda explains “contrary to what our culture is telling you, there can be more than one female in a band! And she doesn’t have to be the singer!” So come support these fantastically badass females Friday, March 24th!

Band:

Linda Bassick – Guitar & Vocals

Miriam Bernardo – Vocals

Rachel Capobianco – Drums & Vocals

Caroline O’Connor – Bass

Zoe Harris – Alto Sax

Margot VanHorne – Trumpet

Allison Frazier – Baritone Sax

Megan Waterhouse – Tenor Sax
Sometimes Kat Wright on vocals (when she is not busy with her band!)