Hello friends and readers!  It’s been a wild and crazy year for us, we moved and renovated our house, and moved our business too!  Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about what we want the purpose of this blog to be, and we want to do a few new things around here!

The original (and current) goal of this blog is to demonstrate and give ideas of how to use our products.  Often when we tell people what we do and what we sell, they ask, “Well what can you do with that?”  We started this blog to answer that question, and we still want to do that, with great recipes and ideas.

But in addition to that, we just want to connect with our customers.  Because of a trademark issue, we nearly had to close the business this year, and we were so very sad.  But after some negotiation and discussion with the opposing company, they withdrew their opposition.  When we posted about those things on our Facebook page, the outpouring of support for both posts was phenomenal!  We received emails, phone calls and tweets from a lot of lovely people, expressing sorrow at closing, then triumph at being able to stay open!  Our post about being able to keep the business open was our most successful Facebook post thus far, by a long shot!  We love our customers, and we want to connect with you, and you to connect with us.

First, we should introduce ourselves.  We’ve already done a little of that on the About page, but let’s just do a random 10 list, because who doesn’t like a list?!

1. Wild Bean Vanilla Co. is a family run company, by me (Andrea), and my husband Chad, with a lot of support from our family members.  We have no outside employees or help.
2. We have two young sons, ages 6 and 3.  Or, 3 and a HALF, as he likes to remind us. 
3. Right now, Chad and I both work full-time corporate jobs.  We run this business on nights and weekends.  So, if you receive emails from us at weird times, or we don’t get back to you right away – that’s why!  We’re sorry about that.  We hope someday this will be a fulltime gig, and we are absolutely dedicated to serving you all, we hope that you’ve felt that!
4. We are located in Mesa, AZ, and recently acquired retail space, but since we only work nights and weekends, and we don’t have outside employees, it’s not regularly staffed.  BUT, we are available to meet there by appointment, during the day even, given some notice.
5. We started this business when a friend gave us a bottle of real vanilla extract and we realized it does make a huge difference in the taste of your foods and baked goods.  We hope you try it, and you’ll see too!
6. We love to talk to our customers, so always feel free to tweet us, email us, Facebook us or comment on this blog.
7. We’ve been known to promote others’ blogs, recipes and shops on our Facebook page, just because we enjoy them.
8. Since owning a small business of our own, we’ve shifted more of our personal shopping and spending to small and local business as much as possible.  I’m not going to say it’s 100%, (we still love us some Amazon), but definitely more than we used to.  We’ll continue to press forward on this.
9. We currently sell four varieties of vanilla extracts, and eight varieties of flavored extracts.  Our most popular vanilla is Madagascar Bourbon (no surprise there, as it’s the most common variety), and our most popular flavored extract is coconut (which did surprise us a little!)
10. My absolute favorite recipe on this blog is the Hot Vanilla, and second to the Homemade Vanilla extract, it’s yours too!

Well we hope this has given you more insight into our company and who we are!  Now, share with us a little about you!  If you have a blog or store, link it in the comments below, so we can get to know you too!