Food Cart Franchises:
I saw a Hundred and One ways to Sell Siomai/Siopao: Most of those offering franchises are for siomai stands. The prices range between 70k to 300k. For instance, a Hen Lin small stand was 300k.

Lechon and Inasal: Heck’s, Inasal, you name it! All were very busy with people inquiring. Too bad no one provided a sample.

Food Toppings: I saw A San Miguel Purefoods labeled franchise called Outbox. Sounds interesting. Next to it was a Smokey’s Hotdog stand franchise but no one was available to talk to me.

One of the best samples I tasted was the one from Scramble King, they provided a little cup of the ice dessert which I vividly remembered buying from a school vendor when I was 6 or 7 years old. It’s been years since I’ve seen or tasted scramble.

There was also another franchise selling Potato Chips in a stick (Twist Chipstix). It was freshly cut and twirled in a stick (see photo). They sold it for 50 pesos. I was not really interested in ordering it but instead I wanted to try their twister fries but it was not available. The potato chips was bland, and the barbecue powder didn’t help much. The potatoes were also not that crunchy. The sales staff were quite enthusiastic though.

Interesting food items.
There were several exhibitors that offered Coconut Sugar. They claimed it was best for diabetics as it had low Glycemic Index.

Tempting offers:
I bought a bag of Tower Yema candies, a chicharon from Marilao, Bulacan, dilis and pusit (3 for 100 offer) from another seller, and finally I bought Tin’s Ball of Ham from Belcris Foods for 300 pesos after sampling their ham.

Tower Yema Candies

are of course hard to resist so I bought one bag for 30 pesos.

Kitchen gadgets: I fancied the charcoal stoves displayed there. I saw 2 kinds: the Joy Charcoal Stove and the JY Firebricks (the oven)
Different kinds of knives for whatever uses you might think of.



For the other interesting food items, would it also make sense to sell them online? Would anyone be actually interested in them?

I literally ran away as fast as I can from those Pushy/Aggressive sales agents : Neo “Fireless” Stove? Water Purifiers for 50k ?! Citibank credit card vendors that were asking for my credit card number?!

I plan to call the ones I am interested in soon. But first I have to prepare my questions. For the franchise offerings I intend to ask them for basic figures, you know things like breakdown of expected costs, the the unit prices of their goods, delivery policies and what the expected daily sales will be, to see what kind of profit I will make. Things I will eventually need to make a sensible business plan. I also have to ask myself, since I am still working fulltime in IT (at MrC’s company), how much hours can I still give to this? Are the earnings from this worth the time and effort?

Credits for above photo go to: Philippine Pictures

These are photos from the island where my mom’s family came from. One of my aunts told me that it is her dream to run a family beach resort in their hometown. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could develop some land along these beach line and run this resort ourselves?

Yesterday, when my husband told his writer friend about our idea of living in the Philippines he sounded so enthusiastic about it that he would even consider going there and help us run a business such as that. Who knows? A visit to this place is surely on top of our list!

• Flexible working hours
• Possibilities to work from home
• Trips to New York
• The possibility of further of growing in my field, but also in building and managing a ICT successful business venture.

It was even written in Dutch but I understood it perfectly well and most of the skills needed seem to match my experience.
So, to make it short I got tempted and e-mailed the contact from the company directly. In less than 2 minutes I got a reply from him. He wanted an interview! I was so excited I totally forgot about applying for the other jobs. This company seems so interesting that researching it further I found out that they do have a great potential in their field. But of course, looking at it again, it will really distract us from our goal.. but we can never know what kind of opportunities it will open up. I replied after a few hours of contemplation and set an appointment for Wednesday next week. He replied very quickly with a confirmation. It was interesting to note that he is the CTO of the company. And then, after like 2 minutes again he e-mailed again! He said that he just realized that I was from Jersey, and he was from New York himself! Interesting! What are the chances!? So anyways, I am really looking forward to this interview myself. Before I actually over-think the consequences of this action, maybe I will go through the interview first and see if I will really qualify. As they say — don’t count the eggs before … whatever!