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The Great Minnesota Get Together

by | Sep 9, 2015 | Life | 1 comment

It seems like forever ago that I posted about working at the Minnesota State Fair.

My intentions were to completely disconnect from my normal routine and get motivated for the holiday selling season. I am happy to report that I achieved that goal, but things that I didn’t anticipate, happened.

The greatest gift from this experience was that I worked with my 17 year-old son Jack.

Raising a teenager isn’t easy.

Sometimes it isn’t fun.

Sometimes you wonder if you have done anything right.

Jack was on the delivery team and I was on the hot dog skewing team.  I am happy to say that the side of my teenager I saw made me proud. I saw a very hard worker, a young man who is courteous, responsible and accountable. Many people went out of their way to tell me how wonderful he was. These are things that every parent loves to hear.

By far, I was the oldest person working on the skewing team. These are the fun group of kids I worked side by side with day after day.

 

The day usually started around 8:30 am with a routine of unloading three to four pallets of hot dogs (300-400 boxes) into the coolers and then setting up our skewing equipment.

We stood for eight to ten hours each day sticking Pronto Pups. We placed 10 hot dogs across 5 layers high into a formed block before putting it into the silver pressing machine. The machine pushed each stick into the dog at exactly the same depth. We then took each dog back out of the block and placed them into a 100 count box.

Thank goodness there was always a  variety of music blasting and a lot of conversation. Anything to break the monotony. 🙂

If you are a person who likes numbers, each two person team skewed on average 100 boxes of dogs a day.

10,000 dogs x 2 teams = 20,000 dogs a day.  And that doesn’t include the foot long teams number of about 10,000 dogs a day.

12 days of the fair x 30,000 dogs a day = 360,000 Pronto Pups and Pronto Dogs.

My personal favorite fact, a Pronto Pup sold for $4 and a Pronto Dog, or foot long sold for $7. Can you say Cha-Ching!

On the tenth day of the fair we had a surprising change of routine.  A film crew from the Travel Channel came in after lunch to shoot a segment for Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern.

I personally don’t think that Pronto Pups/Corn dogs are bizarre, but they didn’t ask me. 🙂

They filmed for about an hour and a half. Every step of the process had to be shot about three times. As they were filming, everyone had to be perfectly silent. We were all a little punch drunk and sleep deprived at this stage of the fair. Keeping silent as they were rolling was as comparatively difficult as trying to be quiet in church. Not a very easy thing to do. 🙂

The Travel Channel crew thought that this episode would air in four to five months. Should be interesting how it all looks through the lens of a camera.

Now that the fair is over it is back to what I love. I hit the ground running yesterday with so many new product ideas and blog posts I want to share with you. It’s gonna be epic! 🙂

So as they say in show business….That’s a wrap!