Brett Hutley's Blog » Business

What’s in your honey, honey?

brett — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:56:48 +0000

I just read this fascinating article from Food Safety News about honey. I had no idea that honey was such a dirty business!

Apparently over 75% of honey sold in US grocery stores isn't strictly "honey". It's been "ultra-filtered", a process that removes the natural pollen from the honey. A process whose only purpose appears to be to disguise the origin of the honey.

There are laboratories in the US that can determine the origin of honey by the different pollen contained within it. By ultra-filtering the honey, it becomes impossible to determine where the honey came from.

Ultra-filtering involves heating the honey, potentially watering it down, and then forcing it through extremely fine filters to remove the pollen.

The process appears to have sprung from the high tariffs imposed on China's honey producers in 2001 that were aimed at protecting the local US honey industry. The Chinese producers responded by ultra-filtering the honey and transshipping it through other countries without the tariffs - changing labels to hide the originating country in the meantime.

A fascinating insight into a small, dark corner of the food industry.

Kanban

Kanban

brett — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:08:53 +0000

I was browsing a list of tools and services for a lean startup a couple of days ago, when I noticed that many of tools implement a Kanban methodology. I had never heard of Kanban, so I took a quite trip over to Wikipedia.

"Kanban is a method for developing products with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the developers". Hmmmm, that sounds good. Upon further reading, I realised that this is the methodology that the introductary video at Trello was aimed towards. I have been playing around with Trello for a couple of weeks, but hadn't really got my head around how best to apply it.

My curiosity was piqued, so I went and bought one of the seminal books on applying Kanban to the agile software development process - Kanban, by David Anderson.

In the book, David talks about applying 5 principles to the software development process:

Visualize the workflow. This is the benefit that Trello brings to the process.
Limit Work in Progress. This means that work is "pulled" from another part of the workflow, when it is needed.
Manage Flow. The flow of work through the system needs to be quantitatively analysed.
Make Process Policies Explicit.
Improve Collaboratively.

It's definitely a methodology I'll be trying to apply to my own startups.

Funding a start-up company

brett — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:34:16 +0000

I've been doing a lot of research into running a start-up recently, and a name that always pops up is Paul Graham. He runs the Y Combinator, an early-stage venture funding company, and has written an extremely informative article on funding your start-up. I love the analogy he gives about how the different stages of financing your company works like gears on a bike; you should get just enough funding that enables you to drive your company to the next stage. This makes a lot of sense to me. Inc magazine also had an interview with him which I enjoyed.

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