The first batch came out of our kitchen.

Some founders open a release email with "we're so excited." We're not so excited. We're tired. There's citrus drying on every counter, the labels arrived two days late, and the dog has been banned from the kitchen for the duration. But the first batch is real, and it's in jars, and that's worth writing about.

What the batch looks like

• 600 × 30g retail jars, 200 each of Lemon, Lime, Orange.
• 30 × 500g hospo pouches for the first ten bars that said yes to a trial.
• 20 × 1kg pouches for the bars that already converted (we won't name them yet, but they're in central Auckland and they pour very good negronis).
• 80 × Citrus Trio gift boxes, assembled from the jar stock above.
• 100 × starter kits for the first wave of DTC tester orders.

The total: roughly 4kg of dried citrus. Which doesn't sound like much until you remember it took ~30kg of fresh lemons, limes, and oranges to make.

What worked

• Slow drying. We held the dehydrators between 50-55°C, which is slower than most operators run. The rinds came out the colour of the fruit, not the colour of toast. Worth the extra time.
• Buying small. Sourcing from named growers in single boxes meant we could taste-check every input. One box of limes came in flat; we sent it back, no drama, no notes.
• Glass jars over pouches for retail. Customers can see what they bought. The pouch versions for hospo work because bars unpack into back-of-bar containers anyway.

What didn't

• Label adhesive. The first 50 labels lifted on the curved jars overnight. We switched suppliers; the new ones haven't lifted. Note for batch two: don't trust a label until it's been on the jar for a week.
• Cutting consistency. First two batches had thicker wheels than we wanted (closer to 4mm than 3). We bought a better mandolin, every wheel in batch three is at 3.0mm ± 0.2.
• Naming files. Lemon-batch-3-final-FINAL-v2.psd happened. We have a system now.

What's next

The next dehydrator arrives next month. That doubles our weekly capacity from ~7kg to ~14kg dried. Which means we can finally say yes to the hospo accounts we've been politely deferring.

After that: a Recipes page that's worth bookmarking. A Wholesale portal that doesn't make trade buyers fill in their NZBN twice. And, quietly, the first round of conversations with two specialty grocers about putting jars on a shelf.

Thanks for being here for the first batch. We owe you a good wheel.