Upper Midwest Gourmet

We hope to see you there, please visit us in our booths 326 & 328!

Coffee Fest Minneapolis
Minneapolis Convention Center – June 04 – 06, 2010

In this challenging time of economic uncertainty, with trusted advice more valuable than ever, Coffee Fest brings you the nation’s best retail operators and industry professionals and consultants to ensure your business survives and even thrives with today’s profitability threats and tomorrow’s challenges.

Event Location
Minneapolis Convention Center
1301 Second Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55403-2781
612-335-6000

(For additional information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

Thanks to everyone that took part in the Fabbri workshop yesterday at UMG. Special thanks to Tom Trieshmann and Donna Domiano “The Gelato Queen” from Fabbri North America for their efforts and expertise.

Donna and Tom put on a great workshop by making some amazing gelatos and sorbettos, refreshing seasonal drinks, beautiful pastries, and showed us all how to use Fabbri in a ton of different applications.

Here is a link to all pictures from the event:

Fabbri Workshop

Donna’s pics from Fabbri Seminar

If this looks like something you want for your business or if you have questions please Contact Us.

Thanks again!

UMG is happy to announce some new products:

• Barista Fria (from the makers of Island Oasis): the newest smoothie/frappe option to hit the market! Complete with awesome equipment placement options.

• Sugarcane Plates: 6″ & 9″ round plates (perfect for any food, hot or cold, and completely biodegradable/compostable!)

• International Paper “National Parks” Ecotainer: 12oz, 16oz, and 20oz hot cups and lids. Proceeds support our National Parks.

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

Hooray for Spring!

Please check out our newest Brewsletter – Volume 40 – Spring 2010

Also, please go to the Brewsletters Page on our website to download and read previous Brewsletters. They contain lots of useful information!

Enjoy and thanks again from all of us at UMG!

Now, don’t those look delicious? You agree, you say? Well here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar (packed)

1/4 cup butter, softened

1 1/2 cups ripe banana, mashed (2-3 bananas)

2 large eggs

1/3 cup plain yogurt

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/3 cup Fabbri Nocciola E Cacao delipaste (Nutella flavor)

Directions:  Preheat oven at 350 degrees

1) Combine softened butter and granulated and brown sugars in large bowl.

2) Mix in mashed bananas

3) Sift in 1 cup of flour along with salt and baking powder. Mix thoroughly.

4) Now mix in wet ingredients including: eggs, yogurt and vanilla

5) Mix in another cup of flour. Combine thoroughly.

6) Finally, add delipaste.  Mix thoroughly, giving the entire muffin a chocolate color and flavor.

7) Add mix into greased muffin pan or pan liners.  Sprinkle on slivered almonds for extra pizzazz.

Bake for 18-22 min. or until toothpick comes out clean.

Yield: 12 muffins

UMG/Flamenco was able to go to Dominican Republic last month for a coffee origin trip. It was a blast overall! We all learned a ton about coffee and a whole lot more about the island and its history.

Please check out our Flamenco Origin Trips Page to view pictures and videos. We will have some stories and more information soon. Enjoy!

UMG is now making our own gourmet scone mix. You can make delicious scones in as little as 15 minutes from the bowl to you display case. They smell amazing as they’re baking and taste even better. How’d you like to save $1000′s of dollars every year and double your bakery business? We know your sales will increase with the very first case you buy. If you’re paying .75-$1.00 (or more) a scone now you’ll save over $1000 dollars, enough to buy a Cadco counter-top convection oven with just 3 cases of scone mix and after that, the $1000 goes into your pocket every 3 cases. You control the flavors, you control the quality of ingredients. It’s so easy you can teach any employee to make them. Never again will you run out of scones at noon and turn away customers for the rest of the day. You’ll just bake more in 15 minutes!!! The smell will cause more sales and customers will drool as they watch you pull the fresh pans out of the oven. Don’t over order from your supplier because you might run out and then have to sell day old at half price. Don’t sell day old delivered product as fresh either. Bake bake bake, did we mention it was easy? Call us now for more info on the great mix and Cadco’s great new counter-top oven. Stop by the showroom and we’ll bake a batch for you to try. You will never regret baking your own. Stop by our booth at the Milwaukee restaurant show March 8th-10th and try them there too. I’m going to go eat another, darn they’re good.

Cheers, David

UMG and Flamenco Organic Coffee Company are ecstatic to now have our own hot cup! These beautiful cups are now in stock at UMG and are ready to be ordered today.

These International Paper hot cups come in 12oz, 16oz, and 20oz, have a universal lid for all three sizes, and their patent-pending Thermashield™ technology, combined with the overall durable construction of our cup provides better insulating performance than any other paper hot cup in the industry.

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

Please click below for an updated Flamenco Offerings List – February 2010

Thanks again to all of you that love your Fair Trade Organic coffees from Flamenco Organic Coffee Company.

Feel free to Contact Us for more information or Order Yours today!

Many of you may be familiar with our Italian product line Fabbri, which produces a variety of gelato and pastry ingredients. The most common application for these products, specifically with the delipaste, is to flavor gelato. Well, this weekend I went home with a few samples of the Pistachio Fine delipaste, some rose extract oil and a mind set on experimentation. I love baking and I really don’t do it often enough, yet I have all of these exotic and delicious ingredients at my fingertips. Well, I decided enough is enough. It’s time to start taking advantage of the Fabbri products and commence experimental baking.

On Friday, I found a recipe for Pistachio cupcakes and Rose Petal buttercream online. I tweaked the recipe in order to accommodate my flavoring ingredients and improvised on quantities a bit. I’m a true believer in “to taste” baking, at least with flavoring ingredients. This recipe is a chiffon-style cake and can be labor-intensive and/or tricky, but never fear. The end result is delicious and well worth the effort.
So here it is: 
Pistachio Cupcakes
36 regular cupcakes / 350 degree oven
*2-3/4 cups cake flour sifted
1-1/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
**1/2 -3/4 cup grape seed oil (or vegetable oil)
8 egg yolks (approximately 6 ounces)
1/2 cup water
4-6 ounces pistachio delipaste
10 egg whites (approximately 10 ounces)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cream of tarter

Read the rest of this entry »

Wisconsin Food Expo Milwaukee, WI; March 8th through the 10th, 2010 - Booth 748

Ah yes, the show season is soon to be upon us. For starters, Upper Midwest Gourmet will be showing off our duds again this year in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Restaurant Associations annual Expo to be held at the Airline Center in downtown Milwaukee on March 8th trough the 10th (Mon-Wed). Go to www.wirestaurant.org/expo/ for more details on this show and to register. As in the past years, UMG has a boat load of FREE PASSES for Wednesday the 10th, the last day of the show. Please contact us direct at 612-728-7208 or contact Kevin direct at 612-250-8277 or Kevin@umgcoffee.com and we will mail you the tickets. You will need to register them once you have the ticket code. This can be done the day of the show at the door. This year we will be highlighting our new line of Ce Organic and Fair Trade, all natural flavoring syrups, our new International Paper Insulated Hold & Go Hot cups, Angela Marie’s Mega Marshmallow Munchies crisp rice bars, Pacific Foods Organic Simply coffee & tea ready to drink products, Deep River all natural chips and snacks, and our new Flamenco Organic Coffee Direct coffees. We will also have a new espresso machine on hand for your review, use and sampling of our espressos.

This is one of those shows that our staff ALWAYS looks forward to because of the amount of you that take the time to visit with us there and the many new customers we are lucky enough to meet each year. Of the many food & coffee shows that we show at, this has always been the best run and most fun to attend so I encourage you to try to make it if you can, you will not be disappointed!

Coffee Fest Minneapolis, MN, June 04 – 06, 2010

We are very excited to announce that the folks at Coffee Fest have scheduled one of their 2010 show right here in Minneapolis this year in June. Coffee Fest is still one of the better coffee focused shows in the industry so we expect nothing less at this show. We among many other local, regional and international companies will be showing. This Upper Midwest region of the country is finally getting the recognition we have so rightfully earned in the coffee world so this show should be full of useful information for any café owner in this market. As more details come in, we will continue to pass them on to you so please stay tuned or go directly to www.coffeefest.com for more details and to register for this show.

We always love to see our customers at every show we attend so please do come and say hello at one or both of these shows. Upper Midwest Gourmet will also be announcing our annual picnic/open house very soon so please stay tuned for that date to be made.

We thank you all for your continued support and patronage. We are nothing without our great customers and we are driven by your support to continue to improve our services and offerings to you!

See you at the shows!

All of us at Upper Midwest Gourmet would like to wish you, your family, your friends, and your staff a very Happy and Healthy New Year in 2010! We truly believe that your success creates our success and we promise to continue to support and serve you as much as possible!

Please always know that we are just a phone call or email away. UMG has been on the cutting edge of the coffee shop and cafe industry for almost 20 years! We have seen the latest and greatest fads come and go, but there are a few constants that will always remain the same. Coffee drinks and blended beverages are your bread and butter because  of their great profit margins. I agree with my previous statement, but I’ve learned that to be truly successful offering retail sales and food is a must.

One constant that makes any businesss successful is a self-motivated staff with ambitious goals along with a desire to always work hard no matter if it is within their job description or not. This is something amazing that I witness everyday working at UMG, but also something that is very obvious in many of the most succesful cafes that we work with. Striving to always be better is something that rarely breeds anything, but success.

Our guarantee to you, our customers, in this new year and decade is that we will continue to strive to always be better. In fact, we will be taking a coffee origin trip to Dominican Republic to meet our Flamenco Direct Relationship coffee friends and their families in February. This will give us a better understanding of all aspects of coffee production, but will more importantly build a stronger relationship with people we care about, just like our customers. We want you to know that there may be other companies that sell similar type products, but you will never find a company with more personal dedication to their customers than us.

We aren’t just a Midwest distributor of coffee shop products or just a Fair Trade Organic coffee roastery in Minnesota or just a gelato equipment and ingredient company. We are so much more than all of those titles and all we want is a chance to prove that to you this year!

Please Contact Us if you have any questions about what we can do for you.

Thanks for your support!

Check out UMG and Flamenco Organic’s own, Charles Roberson, hanging out with some of the Vikings O-Line, Pat and Kevin Williams, over the Holidays!

Who else thinks Charles should be trying out for the Vikes next year?

Newco is one of only two companies making home brewers that are certified by the Specialty Coffee Association of America to brew at the correct temperatures. The OSC 8 & 12 are both now back in stock after selling out quickly on their original USA production run. If you’ve been wanting to make coffee at home that tastes as good as it does on the $1000 commercial machines at your favorite coffee shop, then these are just the ticket for you. The 8 and 12 cup brewer specifications are both listed below.

Newco OCS-8 Coffee Maker

* The quality and durability of a commercial machine in a home model.
* 8 cup thermos carafe with patented brew through pour lid.
* High quality polycarbonate construction.
* Easy pour over feature for brewing coffee.
* Pour and serve allows you to get a cup of coffee while brewing.
* No temperature or water volume adjustments.
* Markings indicate water needed to make corresponding number cups of coffee.
* Filter basket swings open for easy insertion of filter.
* Audible beep and automatic shut off after brew cycle is completed.
* 1500 watt heating element for fast brewing.
* Lead free construction.
* Color is black.
* 7 1/2″W x 10″D x 15 1/2″H.
* Bunn Filters sold separately.
* Sold As: 1 ea.

Newco Warranty:

* 1 year limited.
* Lifetime technical support.

The Newco OCS-8 carafe holds temperature for 4-6 hours. The patented self sealing, dual action brew through and pour out lid is an industry standard. The OCS Brewer uses a high wattage heating element for fast brewing up to ten pots per hour. The near boiling temperature is ideal for hot tea or specialty coffee.

Newco OCS-12 Coffee Maker

* The quality and durability of a commercial machine in a home model.
* 12 cup stainless steel thermos carafe with patented brew through pour lid.
* High quality polycarbonate construction.
* Easy pour over feature for brewing coffee.
* Pour and serve allows you to get a cup of coffee while brewing.
* No temperature or water volume adjustments.
* Markings indicate water needed to make corresponding number cups of coffee.
* Filter basket swings open for easy insertion of filter.
* Audible beep and automatic shut off after brew cycle is completed.
* 1500 watt heating element for fast brewing.
* Lead free construction.
* Color is black.
* 7 1/2″W x 10″D x 15 1/2″H.
* Bunn Filters sold separately.
* Sold As: 1 ea.

Newco Warranty:

* 1 year limited.
* Lifetime technical support.

The Newco OCS-12 carafe holds temperature for 4-6 hours. The patented self sealing, dual action brew through and pour out lid is an industry standard. The OCS Brewer uses a high wattage heating element for fast brewing up to ten pots per hour. The near boiling temperature is ideal for hot tea or specialty coffee.

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

Upper Midwest Gourmet is proud to now carry these great products from International Paper, Pacific Natural Foods, and CE Organics.

Please enjoy some information sheets about the awesome new products!

International Paper – Hold&Go Hot Cup

Pacific Natural Foods – Ready-To-Drink Teas & Coffees (Fair Trade & Organic)

CE Organics – Flavoring Syrups & Sauces (Fair Trade & Organic)

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)