ThankFULL times!

With predicted snowfall happening all around us, frigid temperatures approaching, and the smell of our delicious baked gourmet pretzels filling the office, we know this can only mean one thing: Thanksgiving is almost here! While we know we are not the first ones to obsess over this holiday, as a company that focuses solely on gourmet food, we think our obsession is within pretty good reason. What holiday could be better than one entirely dedicated to food? Our thoughts exactly…

Thanksgiving brings so much to the table, what with all the food, entertainment, sports, and shopping to go around!  But as most of our pretzel fans know, giving back through our pretzels with a purpose is always our top priority, especially around the holidays!

Tomorrow, our Kim and Scott’s team will head to the 1^st Annual North Shore Turkey Run, a 5k taking place in Winnetka, IL on the beautiful trails of the Skokie Lagoons forest preserve. Part of tomorrow’s race will be dedicated to a canned food drive where participants and volunteers are encouraged to bring canned goods to support the charity, WINGS, an organization dedicated to helping abused homeless women and children. Our team will be donating our delicious pretzel rods to all the participating runners, and our 4-pack stuffed pizza pretzels to tomorrow’s division winners. If you are in the area, we always love to see the support of fellow pretzel fans! For more information on this race, you can visit the North Shore Turkey Run web site here.

As this gloomy Wednesday comes to an end, we hope everyone has a very safe and wonderful Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow. Everyone here at Kim and Scott’s feels so thankful to get the opportunity to share our pretzel blog with you each week, and we want to make sure all of you know how appreciative we are. We really hope you enjoy all the food, entertainment and opportunities to spread the pretzel love! Talk with you soon pretzel fans!

Sending Pretzel Love to The Sid Legacy Fund

Happy Wednesday, pretzel fans! November is really flying by fast for all of us here at Kim and Scott’s, especially with all the great DePaul University initiatives we’ve been lucky enough to help out with in recent weeks.

It’s no surprise we are pretty big fans of our Chicago community, and that goes for our surrounding schools as well. We always love to see DePaul Blue Demons at our Café Twist in Lincoln Park and when initiatives on campus come our way, we are more than ready to help out any way we can.

At Kim and Scott’s, we believe in the importance of empowering our youth and their education, so when we found out about the Sid Legacy Fund at DePaul University, we couldn’t wait to get involved and donate in any way we could.

Each year, the Sid Legacy Fund allows two deserving students from the Chicago Public School district to receive funding for four years of tuition at DePaul University. This legacy is dedicated to making a lasting difference on Chicago’s youth and community by offering financial assistance to obtain college degrees.

This month, the Sales Leadership Program at DePaul put on a bake sale to raise funds for the Sid Feldman Legacy donating 100% of the proceeds to this scholarship fund. When we heard our pretzels could help make a difference we were more than ready to donate!

The bake sale we participated in took place during DePaul’s recent finals week, where we donated 11 cases of our delicious Cheddar Jalapeno gourmet pretzels. We hope our delicious twisted snack helped keep all our hungry DePaul students happy during those long study sessions.

To find out how you can donate to this wonderful scholarship fund visit the Sid Feldman Legacy website!

Pretzel Power Helps out Pedal Power!

Happy November pretzel fans! Fall is passing us by quickly this year, and with the winter months fastly approaching, we are trying to squeeze in all our favorite fall activities before the dreaded snow arrives!

This weekend, our Kim and Scott’s team had the opportunity to help out a great cause for one of fall’s favorite past times: bike riding! As you know, our Pretzel Power initiatives are some of the things we enjoy most about our job, so when we heard about the Pedal Power Bike Drive, we jumped at the opportunity to support our Chicago community and school system any way we could!

We had a wonderful time this weekend participating in the 2010 Pedal Power Bike Drive. This event is dedicated to helping reward kids in the city of Chicago with bicycles and scooters for doing well in school.

Our Kim and Scott’s truck came in pretty handy this weekend! Our team was able to help pick up and transport dozens of bicycles from all over the North Shore area to surrounding Chicago-land grade schools. This bike drive will help supply so many deserving students with a nice reward for doing well in school, and we always love supporting our young community and the empowerment of education.

For more information on how you can help the Pedal Power initiative, visit their web site or visit them on their facebook page and learn more about this great event!

A Nourished Life!

We are very grateful that we get to be in the business we love so much, and any time Kim and Scott’s gets recognized in the press, we know it’s because of all the wonderful support we receive from our pretzel fans each and every day. We are extremely lucky we get to do what we love, and that’s why today’s blog post is dedicated to all of you who supported us from the very beginning. Recently, Kim and Scott were featured in an article from Examiner.com, and not only were they able to reminisce about how their love for pretzels began, they were also able to give us a sneak peak at where their pretzel love is going next! We couldn’t wait to share this article with all of you and thank you for joining us on our pretzel journey.

We were thrilled the article was able to touch on so many of the different projects we are currently involved in and excited about. We are always trying to twist up new ways to bring awareness to the causes closest to our hearts and this article did a wonderful job for us!

Most of you may not know the story behind Kim and Scott Holstein’s twisted fate, but once you read the article you will understand why these two were meant to be. Not only do they remember where they met, they can also remember the exact moment they met. We wish we could say it was on memory alone, but Kim and Scott’s paths crossed at a book signing for Richard Bach, and Scott still has the receipt from the first night they met at the bookstore.

Since that first night in the bookstore, Kim and Scott have been able to achieve the incredible balance between business and philanthropy. Our newest initiative, the Pretzel Dough program, is in full swing and we can’t wait to keep this program going. The Chicago area has been so kind to everyone here at Kim and Scott’s and we are thrilled to be able to give back to our local schools and empower our young community.

This article brings to life Kim and Scott’s twisted fate, the social causes we as a business are committed to, and even the newest pretzel flavor Kim and Scott’s has in the oven! This January, we will launch our first Gluten-Free pretzel so that everyone can enjoy one of our twisted treats.

For more information on our Kim and Scott’s initiatives, visit our web site at www.kimandscotts.com.

For the full Examiner.com article, click here.

Twist-or-Treat!

As October leaves us, we couldn’t think of a better send-off than with a fun-filled Halloween weekend. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Kim and Scott’s Halloween without a little twist! Now, we know most houses pass out candy and door prizes or even the dreaded #2 pencil, but at the Kim and Scott household, it only makes sense that Halloween goers are surprised with a different kind of treat. A more twisted treat, if you will. Any guesses, pretzel fans?

How DID you guess? Of course, our Halloween giveaways this year were our pride and joy! We had a blast passing out Kim and Scott’s gourmet pretzels hot out of the oven to all the trick-or-treaters this year, and with October being quite a chilly month for Chicagoans, we couldn’t think of a better treat for not only kids of all ages, but for parents too!

We had a great weekend passing out our pretzels and seeing all of the fun costumes this year, and even though we didn’t see any pretzels walking around, we were glad to provide a warm and tasty snack for the neighborhood!

As always, we hope everyone had a safe and wonderful Halloween and we can’t wait until next year to see what fun and crazy ideas we can twist up next!